


Rain On The City

by MirasolAbeille



Category: Emily of New Moon - L. M. Montgomery
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-09-02
Updated: 2018-06-23
Packaged: 2018-08-12 14:25:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 16
Words: 38,765
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7938049
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MirasolAbeille/pseuds/MirasolAbeille
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Dean puts himself back together after Emily breaks their engagement.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter One

RAIN ON THE CITY

CHAPTER ONE

The train that Dean Priest boarded in Moncton was a local. If a train was a snake, Dean thought, this one had just eaten a water buffalo and was none too pleased to be moving at all; it belched and shuffled its way southwest toward Boston tiny town by tiny town, pausing with gasping, side-heaving relief to disgorge and receive passengers at twenty-mile intervals.

Dean, accustomed to frequent travel, usually planned ahead and booked a sleeper compartment for such journeys. But there was nothing usual about this trip, and he was too desperate to put Canada behind him even to wait six more hours for a faster, more comfortable train. First class it was, then: softer seats and better food than the noisy, crowded coach cars, but no way to elevate his bad leg without propping his foot up on the opposite seat, and that he could not bring himself to do.

No gentleman would.

"The human body craves symmetry," one of his doctors had told him, back when he was young and hopeful enough to go looking for cures from anyone who would promise them to him. "It seeks balance at every turn, and will cripple itself again and again in search of it."

What that meant, of course, was that the thigh muscle of his longer leg was never fully extended while striding, not even when Dean wore the built-up shoe that particular doctor had recommended for the shorter leg. It bunched and cramped in protest, and - when forced to immobility for any period of time - knotted itself into a hard, defiant lump of shrieking nerve endings just above his knee.

There was another spot just like it below his shoulder blade on the opposite side. _Yes, balance in all things,_ he thought, and smiled grimly to himself. For every action, an opposite reaction. For every moment of stolen joy, a lurking abyss of retributive agony.

_Your hand opens and closes, opens and closes,_ wrote Rumi the Ascetic in one of his flowery Persian sermons. _If it were always a fist or always stretched open, you would be paralyzed._

Dean wondered what Rumi had to say about broken engagements. Not much, he imagined. Being an Ascetic had its advantages.

Nearly to Bar Harbor. Sixteen more hours to Boston.

Sixteen hours farther away. What matter how slowly he was moving, if he was moving in the right direction?

He braced himself against the juddering side of the train, gritted his teeth against the pain, and tried to sleep.

**

Boston was humid and crowded and smelled of coal exhaust, body odor, and day-old fish. Dean managed to winch himself to his feet and descend the steps from the train to the platform without assistance, but stumbled after three or four paces and would have gone to his knees if a nearby porter hadn't caught him by the elbow.

"Steady, sir," the porter said, his gaze skating over Dean's raised shoulder and then rapidly away again. "Let me help you with your bag."

Dean took the help. His knee was screaming. The rest of him was numb.

It was a trick he had mastered back at school, for moments in which his body called unwelcome attention to itself. The trick was to leave the imperfect flesh to its own devices and let the soul float free of it, hovering, disconnected. Whatever humiliation the body endured, it could endure by itself; it would not drag the rest of him down to degradation along with it. Even now, the curious and pitying eyes that followed his limping progress through the station: those eyes, he told himself, were only looking at the wreck of his carcass. They did not see _him._

No one ever saw him.

The porter flagged down a hansom and shoehorned Dean and his valise neatly into the passenger seat. Dean dropped coins into his hand, keeping his face averted. The sooner the porter ceased to exist, the sooner he could pretend that the near-fall on the platform had never happened.

"My bag to the Parker House," he told the driver. "I have a room reserved."

"And you as well, sir? To the hotel?"

"No," said Dean, making a decision, and gave him an address.

**

Boston's Chinatown district was a puny, fledgling David to San Francisco's Goliath – just a few thousand workers who'd come over to make shoes during the factory strike in North Adams, thirty years ago, and never left. Jolting past the laundries and noodle shops on Harrison Avenue in the back of the cab, Dean saw men but next to no Chinese women. The Americans had seen to that in typical xenophobic hysteria, with their Chinese Exclusion Act and their endless series of immigration raids.

No matter, for his purposes, anyway: in any community where there were working men and no marriageable women, there were prostitutes. Most of them were for the workers, but there were a few select better ones for their employers. Sweet-smelling, soft-voiced comforts to remind them of home, to resign them to their exile.

Liu - the queen of them all - did a very brisk business.

"This corner," he told the bemused driver. "No need to wait."

_You will not fall,_ he said to himself, white-knuckling the handholds on the outside of the hansom and fumbling for more coins. _You will put one foot on the ground, and then the other in front of it, and then the other again, and it doesn't matter that you are in pain because you are going to the one place in this godforsaken city that can make - it - stop._

He was at the corner, hissing through his teeth with every dragging, unlovely step but still upright. He was at the red carved door with the green awning.

And here, yes, here was Liu, elegant in a grey silk gown that proud Elizabeth Murray would not have been ashamed to wear to Sunday service, with perhaps another faint line or two at the corners of her eyes but still graceful, still smiling, flawless skin, pure Mandarin profile, offering him her arm and pulling him through the silver brocade door-curtains into her jewel box of a parlor.

"Mr. Priest," she said, taking his measure in a single sweeping glance. "You have been away from us for a long time."

"Travel," said Dean shortly. This was not enough of an explanation – Liu had introduced him to the jeweler where he'd bought Emily's emerald, in a gesture that at the time had seemed very much like a ritual farewell – but she nodded after a moment, took his coat and hat, and hung them in a rosewood armoire.

"We can converse later," she said, "after you are more comfortable. For the moment, I will have Xiaoling show you to the Blue Room."

**

It might have been a mistake to come here, Dean thought.

The Blue Room was hung with shadowy slate-colored silk and lit with candle-lanterns. A fountain splashed in the corner. He leaned heavily on an upholstered arm-chair and tried not to look at Xiaoling, kneeling to remove his boots.

Xiaoling – 'little comforter'. Almost too apt a name; probably she had chosen it, or had it chosen for her. He wondered what her parents had called her.

She was more slightly built than … well, than. And her eyes were dark instead of smoke-grey. But she was young and soft-skinned and folded into a shimmering loose garment the color of moonlight, her hair a shining fall of blue-black, and the sight of her small sure hands unfastening his buttons lit dangerous fires inside him. He was relieved when she stepped away for a moment to the table, then took his arm to draw him with her.

"Sit," she said, pushing him into the chair. The sound of her voice – soft, tinged with the musical tones of Canton, no hint of arch, familiar, heartbreaking impishness – shattered what remained of the mirage he'd conjured; he blinked and sat, and allowed her to lift each leg in turn and settle it inside a bucket of hot water strewn with sharp green-smelling herbs. A length of silk drifted over his lap – more for his own modesty, Dean knew, than for hers.

Next was an herbal tisane in a thick stoneware mug without a handle. He had drunk it before. It was chokingly bitter, but carved out a thin layer of distance between himself and his pain.

_No opium,_ he had told Liu the first time, years ago. _Never any opium; I will not lose the only part of my poor self that I still value to poppy worship._

This was not as effective. But it let him breathe again.

He closed his eyes and listened to the plashing fountain behind him, and only jerked a little when Xiaoling came back with muslin bags of heated dry rice to pack over the aching muscles of his thighs. A moment later, he caught a whiff of strongly mentholated herbal ointment as she moved around behind him, and groaned aloud as her hard little thumbs found the sensitive spots at either side of his nape.

This was a luxury, certainly, but also more pain than pleasure – the punishing pressure of her elbow against the stubborn knot of muscle in his back; the insistent repeated drag of knuckles over the twitching, protesting soles of his feet; her murmured litany of apology as she dug her iron fingers into the shrieking mass of dysfunction in his leg and forced the twisted tendons to release. Hands on his hump, even, matter-of-fact and unhurried in their hard rhythmic massage.

Perhaps she was truly not disturbed by his deformities. More likely, he was simply paying her well enough to pretend.

Dean longed to escape into his mental haven, but every twinge of sensation, welcome or not, pulled him back into visceral awareness of his damaged body. He fought surrender as long as he could, then – when exhaustion and sheer tactile overload claimed him – began, silently, to weep.

One blessing there, he told himself, and only one. If most of these tears were for Emily, who would know it?

It went on and on. The tears dried, eventually, leaving a hollow and not unwelcome lassitude in their place. Her touch hurt him less, now, but felt – _more,_ as though her hands had scoured off a layer of epidermis, leaving him vulnerable and newborn. Dean scrabbled in his mind for the door that would let him escape, and found it too heavy to open. For this moment, for better or worse, he was anchored – all of him – inside this sea of sensation.

Xiaoling peeled the silk back over his groin. He felt her small hard hands vibrating gently on his bare thighs. When he opened his eyes, she was staring up at him from between his legs, eyebrows lifted in mute inquiry: yes, or no?

Sometimes, in the past, he had said yes. To her, or at least others like her. But not for more than a year now, not since he'd thought –

Well. Best not to dwell on it.

He wavered for an agonizing instant on the edge of temptation. That black hair, that slim creamy silhouette against the candles. Warm and wet and attentive, drawing the poison of his grief away from him a ribbon of sensation at a time, the way a spool of thread unwinds when you hold it up and let gravity take the loose end.

A moment of pleasure amid all this despair. A light to hold against the darkness.

He could thread that shiny hair through his hands, touch that satin skin. He could pretend …

"No, thank you," he said, swallowing the high tide of his lust. "I have everything I need at the moment."

A lie, of course.

**

He paid her fee. After only a moment of hesitation, he sorted through his clothes until he found his waistcoat, and dug into the tiny inner pocket for the emerald ring. Her eyes widened when he dropped it into her hand.

"Perhaps it will help you to go home sooner," he said in his broken Cantonese. "There may be people there who love you."

Unspoken: _I envy you that._

Liu summoned a hansom cab for him and slipped a neatly wrapped packet of the analgesic tea into his hands. He did not offer to answer the questions banked in her deep gaze, and she did not pry. Another advantage of dealing with professionals.

"Where do you go next?" she asked lightly as she helped him into his coat. "Is it usually Egypt, this time of year?"

"Not this time," he said, though truthfully he'd thought no further than where he was standing now. "Europe, I think. Italy, perhaps."

"Come and see us again," she said, "when you return. And safe travels to you."

Dean nodded. His leg really did feel very much better.

" _Xiexie,"_ he said, and – giving in to impulse – leaned in and kissed her flawless cheek.

Who knew? Maybe this time it really was goodbye.

You could never tell, with human beings.


	2. Chapter Two

CHAPTER TWO

He had to wait two weeks – nothing, in the grand scheme of world travel – for the next ship to Italy. He could have taken an earlier departure to Marseilles, but the thought of France made his teeth clench. Paris was Teddy Kent's playground now, not his. Why remind himself that Esmerelda never looked at her adoring Hunchback, that his heroic fixation on her led him only to a pauper's grave?

Victor Hugo. Sentimental trash. But even so.

Naples, then, on the SS Vancouver. Shocking what one paid for a single cabin in first class, but that was no matter.

It could be worse, he told himself. You could be a cripple without money. What then?

No leisure, no travel, no distractions. No books.

Books compensated for the lack of almost everything else. And then ... well, and then there was the Parker House breakfast, palatial and British down to the kippers and the kedgeree, and improved further by the addition of their famous, eponymous rolls, hot and buttery from the oven with honey glistening stickily in their deep central creases.

He would miss this breakfast. But then, was there not always another new small pleasure to replace the one left behind?

His trunks were packed and waiting in his flat in Shrewsbury. He sent for them, and they were delivered to the hotel a few days later. What fortune, he thought, that he had not yet unfolded their contents into the charming cedar closets of the Disappointed House.

Thinking of the House hurt him. It was as if the knife in his gut shifted, withdrew, changed angle, and drove in again, just a millimeter away from the first wound. A distinct pain, but tied to the other.

All those years, he thought, his lips twisting, those long years-in-waiting spent breezing through the world as if it were one big open-air bazaar, pausing only to pick up any little trinket that made him think of her. Anything to please her, anything to make her eyes shine and her lips part; anything he could squirrel away as a reminder of her, hope against hope against hope. The House was a shrine to his decade of patient, wholehearted longing. And for what?

_I can't marry you after all, Dean. I don't love you._

He wandered through the city, paging through books that he didn't want to read, looking through windows at goods he had no intention of buying, dining at this place and that though the food tasted like wet newsprint in his mouth. He walked for miles, forcing his leg to bend and flex and take his weight – the best of the doctors had all agreed on that point, that he was better off moving it than keeping it still. And then, four days before his scheduled departure, he held a shop door open for a woman on her way out to the street, and found himself caught in an unexpected fox-fur embrace.

"Dean Priest!" she said. "Darling, how long have you been in the city? And why ever didn't you call on me first thing?"

Dazed by a bracing, rosemary-sharp drift of her Acqua di Regina perfume, he looked up. "Oh," he said, flushing with surprise. "Mrs. Gardner. How wonderful to see you again."

"Isabella, dear," she said, catching his arm at the elbow. "I insist. Now, don't even think of trying to escape, I won't have it. You must come to the house and have dinner with me; I am entirely on my own this evening. The boys are all away at school, the Symphony Guild has moved their meeting to Friday, and I suppose you heard about Jack."

"I did, yes," Dean said. "I am so sorry for your loss."

"Yes, well," she said. "We had a lovely time, didn't we, as long as it lasted? Now come along, that's a good fellow, here's my car."

**

She was an imperious, strong-jawed lady in her middle sixties. Dean had seen the portraits – well, the Singer Sargent, anyway, the best of the lot – and even in her youth, she had been more vivid than beautiful: square of face, snapping of eye, vigorous of opinion. They had met on some steamship or other, if he recalled it correctly, perhaps ten years previous – he on one of his directionless intercontinental wanderings, she and her husband bound for Italy to buy more artifacts for their house in the Back Bay. He remembered long, circular arguments about Dante and Milton, about Botticelli, about the _Hokusai Manga_ , sheaves of unframed paintings by unknown hopefuls stacked like old newspapers in her cabin, glittering diamanté luncheons.

She was unlike any rich society lady of a certain age he'd ever met: utterly without self-importance, devoted to her collections, excited by ideas and by art and indifferent to the fashions that she subsequently ended up setting. She had never seemed even to notice his hump or his limp. At the time, he had thought her a beatified, perfected version of what his Great-Aunt Nancy might have been.

He hadn't supposed that she remembered him at all.

The car was a gleaming ivory Mercedes limousine – "only bought this year," she said, rubbing her hands gleefully together; "a shocking beast, is it not? The boys all want it for joyriding, but only Mr. Mackenzie is trusted with the key. Now, you must see the house. You remember that Jack and I were talking about building it, the summer we crossed to Italy with you. The old one had been added onto so many times it was a patchwork, and still it wouldn't hold all of the lovely things we found."

Dean did remember that conversation – feigned reluctance on Jack's part, laughing insistence on Isabella's. "You wanted a palazzo," he said. "Like – what was the place in Venice? The one you loved so much?"

"Clever boy," she said, patting his cheek. "Good memory. The Barbaro, on the Grand Canal. The most lovely place I've ever seen or ever will. And – look! Didn't I get the feel of it right? No canals, of course, but the Fens are right outside."

"Astonishing," Dean said, and meant it. "Exactly like a Venetian palazzo, only –"

"Shiny and new," she said. "No centuries of patina. But give it time!"

**

The house was four stories, built around a central courtyard garden that took his breath with its lushness. "Glassed in at the top," Isabella said. "Of course they wouldn't, would they, in Venice. But one must make some allowances for Boston winters."

"How can you bear ever to leave it?" Dean asked, fingering a glossy leaf of the potted lemon tree nearest him. She smiled.

"If Jack were still here, I probably never would," she said. "But –" She broke off, shrugging. "Even a beautiful place is just a place. Come now, we must see the Titian before the light goes. And my Japanese woodcuts – seventeenth century, so lively and detailed, they could walk off the page. And oh – the painted leather panels! Jack and I collected them for years, from a dozen different places. France, Italy, the Netherlands. Enough to paper a whole room; I call it the Veronese Room because of the mural on the ceiling. That ceiling was built two years ago in Milan, expressly to house that painting; I had the whole thing brought over and installed. An extraordinary piece; sometimes when I am in the house alone, I lie down on the floor in that room and look at it for hours."

Her old fingers plucked at his sleeve; her eyes were bright and knowing and determined. "Come now, dear," she said, "you look peaked and melancholy, like summer has stolen something from you, and when I feel that way, I simply must look at art. It is art that saves us, you know."

Dean stole a last longing glance at the garden, smiled, and allowed himself to be led away.

At least, he thought, there is an elevator.

**

"It would take days to see it all," he said finally, after three hours. "Everywhere the eye turns, it is dazzled."

"Very like Europe in that regard, is it not?" She hooked her arm through his. "And now, dinner. Veal, I believe."

It was indeed veal, though before it came there were courses of tomato aspic and stuffed cucumbers and tiny roasted quail. "I am fond of game birds," Isabella said. "I once saved our entire traveling party from a meal of garlic and offal in Morocco, by explaining that we were Americans, and that Americans like to eat partridges on Wednesdays." She twinkled at him from over her wine glass. "And my tutors said I would never find a use for Spanish, more fools they. How are your languages, Dean?"

"French and Italian," he said, "enough to get by. Less German – I never took to it, somehow. Some rudimentary Chinese and Japanese – speaking only; I struggle with the written language." He laughed. "It would have been the garlic and offal for me, I'm afraid; I have no Spanish at all."

"I wish I was getting on that ship with you," she said, suddenly pensive. "I have another trip planned for next spring – I didn't show you the wing on the third floor where I intend to put my chapel. There are rumors that I might acquire a very fine French Gothic stained glass window from the eleventh century that used to hang in a cathedral north of Paris. But the weather will be finer in May, and I have friends set to travel with me then."

"Is it so hard to wait for May?"

"It is hard to watch any ship sailing away," Isabella said. "Who knows what awaits on the other side of the ocean?"

They had lemon ices for dessert, and coffee in the Italian style, thick as sludge in the tiny round cups.

"I mean to leave it to the city when I die, you know," she said. "The house, the art. Everything. The boys will do quite well without it, and I won't have my life's work parceled out and sold off at auction." She savored her espresso. "I shall write a codicil to the bequest; nothing can be moved or sold or added, once I've breathed my last. And anything I don't want the public to see before I go, I shall consign to the flames."

"A legacy," Dean said, understanding. "Proof you were here."

"I will be remembered as I choose to be," said Isabella, fiercely. "Not as just another rich woman in a famous man's painting."

"Or the heroine of a novel?" teased Dean. This was intimate territory; he would never have had the courage to mention it without the second glass of wine. Isabella eyed him narrowly.

"Cheeky," she said, but without heat. "But yes. Frank Crawford may have tried to capture me in those pages, but he did not succeed. And he _knows_ he did not – otherwise, why would he have killed off my character?"

"There are a thousand ways to die," said Dean, barely realizing that he spoke aloud. Isabella said nothing for a long moment.

"No," she said finally. Her eyes were faraway but not, he thought, sad, not exactly. "No, there aren't. There's only one. And it hasn't happened to either one of us yet."

It was nearly midnight when he kissed her cheek and bade her farewell in the cool stone entry of her fascinating new-old house. She smiled at him and slipped an envelope into his hand.

"An introduction, of sorts," she said. "Go to Venice. Stay with the Curtises, in the Barbaro villa."

"I couldn't possibly impose on you or your friends."

"Imposition, nothing," she said. "Quite the contrary. It will soothe me to think of you in those lovely rooms, sunning the darkness from your soul."

Dean stared at her.

"It is so obvious, then," he said, "that I am in despair?"

"That you are lonely," corrected Isabella, "and tempted to succumb to solitude rather than fight it any longer." She squeezed his hand. "Keep fighting," she said. "And mind that you send me letters. I may be an old woman, but I still enjoy occasional correspondence with handsome young men."


	3. Chapter Three

CHAPTER THREE

"Reading again, Mr. Priest?" said the wife of the American lumber magnate, shepherding her two daughters into the USS Vancouver's ship library. "How _intellectual_ you are. Girls, isn't he intellectual? What wise words do you have for us today?"

Dean, stifling a sigh, glanced up from his novel. Three pairs of identical round china-blue eyes goggled back at him from beneath heavily trimmed straw summer hats.

The thin daughter was so overbalanced, he thought snidely, the weight of that bonnet might snap her skinny neck if she turned her head too quickly. The fatter daughter looked like a mushroom wrapped in plaid grosgrain. Madame Lumber Magnate's own hat was trimmed on either side with dyed pigeon wings that her milliner had likely sold her as bird-of-paradise, and looked like a discarded prop from a budget production of _Götterdammerung._ He expected her to burst into 'The Ride of the Valkyries' at any moment.

They were still staring. Three days of this – half the length of the voyage – and they were _still staring._

_See the cripple. See the cripple read._

There was no help for it; he was going to have to be rude.

"Gustave Flaubert," he said. "From _November,_ an early novella. 'I tried to discover, in the rumor of forests and waves, words that other men could not hear, and I pricked up my ears to listen to the revelation of their harmony.'"

"How lovely," enthused Madame Lumber Magnate, clasping her hands in front of her like Nellie Melba about to sing a high C. "Such _elevated_ thoughts! And what, pray tell, is the book about?"

"A young man is initiated into the joys of the flesh by a more experienced lady," said Dean flatly, "in matter of fact a courtesan, then comes to regret it." He paused for effect. "In the end, of course, he dies."

The eyes of Daughters Thin and Fat rounded. Madame Lumber Magnate flushed brick-red. Her hands dropped to her sides.

"I see," she said. " _French._ We will leave you to it, then. Girls, _now._ "

Dean watched their disappearing backs – twitching bustles, bobbing oversized heads – with what felt very much like satisfaction, then turned back to his Flaubert.

A snort of muffled laughter broke his concentration.

"Oh, well done," said a voice. Youngish. Female. American, but with a private-school patina. He turned to consider its source.

He didn't know why he hadn't noticed her come into the library. Perhaps she'd come in behind the Lumber Magnates. Perhaps she'd been there in the corner chair all along.

_Bluestocking,_ he thought, which usually carried with it _spinster_ and _suffragist,_ though this woman looked rather too fresh-faced and merry to wear either of those grim titles easily. She was wearing her brown hair in a coronet of braids – the overall effect was of a style more efficient than artistic – and her blue morning dress was cut in the roomy, flowing Reform silhouette. She had papers on her lap and an ink stain on her finger.

The ink stain gave him a moment's pause. Emily had such a mark on her forefinger, though it had lightened almost to nothing during the year of their engagement.

"I beg your pardon," he said, opting for chilly politesse. "I had been considering the most efficient means of detaching those three for days now. But I didn't mean for anyone else to overhear my lack of courtesy."

Her eyes – a lovely clear shade of light brown – laughed at him. "You needn't revert to platitudes on my behalf," she said. "It was an utter rout, expertly delivered; you should be proud of it. And I enjoyed it every bit as much as you did."

He expected a second salvo – it was what women did; they prolonged conversation – but she turned back to her papers and pen, leaving him to consider her profile.

How old was she? he wondered. Twenty-seven? Twenty-eight?

And what was she writing?

**

Madame Lumber Magnate and her brood of unlovely splinters pointedly ignored him at dinner. Dean countered by pretending not to notice the snub, and instead made himself more charming than usual, directing his conversation toward the two young British men at their table. Not that he particularly wanted to talk to them. One of them was a Harold - second son of a gambling-addicted viscount - and the other an Oliver – heir to a worthless entailed title and a crumbling pile of stone somewhere in Sussex. Beyond the names, they were interchangeable in their tedium.

Still, they were precisely the sort of impoverished, weak-chinned scion of the British aristocracy that the Daughters Lumber were on this voyage to ensnare. Dean knew he shouldn't interfere – trading titles for money via matrimony was serious business for all parties involved – but the petty pleasure to be gained by impeding these particular shipboard romances was too great not to indulge.

"Brandy?" he suggested near the end of the poached pears. Harold and Oliver, who had been trapped in the parlor the previous evening with the Lumbers and their album of holiday postcards, agreed with alacrity. Behind their backs, Madame Lumber was unable to suppress a grimace of frustration.

"It would be a great pity not to have some entertainment," she said with hauteur, "after you gentlemen have refreshed yourselves. Minnie plays the pianoforte beautifully, and Margaret has been praised for her singing voice. The other ladies may contribute as well, of course, if they care to take part." She sent Dean what she probably thought was a cutting glance. "Good wholesome music is _so_ restorative to the human spirit."

"So is brandy, madam," Dean said smoothly. "But by all means, let us follow our libations with a musicale." He smiled at her unpleasantly. "I am sure that Minnie and Margaret will not fail to meet the expectations you have raised for them."

**

"What a horrifying old tart," said Oliver, lifting his tumbler of brandy. "And the daughters. Nightmares both."

"The eternal problem," said Harold, a trifle unsteadily. He was on his second generous glass, and beginning to slur. "A compromise will be necessary at some point, of course, to hold body and soul together. But can one be honestly expected to descend that far?"

"That depends," Oliver said, gloomily. "How badly does your manor house need a new roof?"

They both seemed to have forgotten Dean's presence, which suited him to the ground; he sipped his brandy and said nothing. The first-class men's smoking room was warm and quiet – leather chairs, oil-rubbed wood, the faint ingrained scent of pipe tobacco, high vaulted skylights beyond which shimmered the cool and silent stars. In the opposite corner, an old man slept, a newspaper tented over his lap, his outdated top hat next to him on the side table.

Harold drained the second glass.

"I'll tell you who I'd rather have, if I had to pick from the ship's roster," he announced. "Miss Whatsit."

"Who?"

"You know. Brainy. Just a bit on the plump side. American, but not like those other two." He considered his empty glass owlishly. "Scribbles."

"You mean Miss Lowell?" Oliver said. "Isn't she a bit on the shelf? Must be twenty-five if she's a day."

"Who cares?" Harold set the glass down with a clang. "She's jolly enough; we'd rub along all right, I daresay. Buckets of money. And then there's the family, too – quite respectable even if she is from the new side of the pond. Boston Brahmins, what."

"Lowell," said Dean thoughtfully. "I am acquainted with a socialite from Boston named Amy Lowell; she travels nearly as often as I do. She has aspirations of being a writer, I think, though she must be in her early thirties now and so far hasn't published anything."

"No, no," said Harold, shaking his head. "I know Amy too. That's her older cousin, and no use trying to unite the bloodlines there; she's a fervent Sapphic. This one's named Rosalind, and fancies herself a composer, if you can believe it. Studied in Paris and everything." He grinned. "So much the better, I say. Let her stay in Paris; I can still spend her money in London."

"Perhaps she'll favor us with a song at the ladies' musicale, and you can see if Paris was worth it," suggested Oliver, then groaned. "Blast it, the musicale. If we don't present ourselves forthwith, the old bat will be knocking down the door."

**

Minnie and Margaret regaled the assembled company with selections from _Die Fledermaus,_ in English translation. It was everything Dean had imagined it would be.

They garnered their tepid applause and retired, simpering, to the front row. The audience, restive but resigned, suffered further through a breathy recitation of Keats, an indifferently played Clementi sonatina, and some dismal folk songs from one of the soggier peninsulas of the British Isles, intoned through the lady singer's nose and accompanied on an ill-tuned lap-harp.

"Miss Lowell plays," said Harold with every evidence of enthusiasm, as the last twang of the harp died away. Dean saw Madame Lumber grimace in a most unladylike manner; it made her look more operatic than ever. "And writes her own music, to boot! Give us a number, Miss Lowell, do."

Dean was reminded suddenly, viscerally, of Emily – a very young Emily – raging about being asked to write a funeral ode to order. Rosalind Lowell had something of the same look in her eyes now. But she was not Emily, not sensitive and sixteen; she smiled and said something prettily self-deprecating and came to the front of the room.

She had dressed for dinner, he noticed, in a gown of bronze taffeta. The color suited her better than her blue day dress, though this gown too was cut in the shapeless Rational style and floated away from her in layers without revealing the contour of her body. The ink stain was still on her finger.

"I do write songs," she said, "but I shall not sing any of them for you tonight, as it is never my own voice for which I write and, inexpert as they are, I should not do them justice. But songwriters are forever reading poetry, searching for new words to waken melodies within them, so perhaps I can appease you with a recitation of one of my discoveries."

She swept a loose tendril of hair back from her face, seeming not to notice that Minnie and Margaret were giggling together five paces in front of her. "The book from which this excerpt is taken was written by a Japanese poet named Yone Noguchi, and was published in London only last year. It is called 'Eastern Seas'."

She recited simply, in a low clear voice, her face turned into the light and smoothed from merriment into a serenity that Dean found strangely compelling:

> There is nothing like the moon-night
> 
> When I raise my face from the land of loss
> 
> Unto the golden air, and calmly learn
> 
> How perfect it is to grow still as a star.
> 
> There is nothing like the moon-night
> 
> When I walk upon the freshest dews,
> 
> And amid the warmest breezes,
> 
> With all the thought of God
> 
> And all the bliss of man, as Adam
> 
> Not yet driven from Eden, and to whom
> 
> Eve was not yet born. What a bird
> 
> Dreams in the moonlight is my dream:
> 
> What a rose sings is my song.

**

"Wasn't that … _queer,"_ Dean heard Madame Lumber say, as the company dispersed toward their staterooms. "Imagine one of those heathens from Japan writing a poem about God. I had no idea such a thing was even _allowed,_ did you?"

He remained behind in his chair for a moment or two, smiling to himself. Rosalind Lowell paused by his chair, her eyes as guarded now as they had been open and laughing this morning.

"You find something amusing, Mr. Priest?"

"I know a bit about Yone Noguchi," Dean said. "But that speaks more to my own love of arcane literature and tolerance for subversive politics than anything else; I spent some time in San Francisco, a few years ago, and am acquainted with the crowd he runs in. How did you come to know his writing?"

The corner of her mouth twitched, and the light came back into her eyes. "If I say that we have friends in common, will you scorn me as a fallen woman?"

"If I dared do such a thing," returned Dean, "I have no doubt that you would brush off my scorn like dust from the hem of your gown. What use have you for my opinion?"

"That depends," said Rosalind, smiling at him. "Is your opinion useful?"

This felt, thought Dean, very much like the beginnings of a flirtation. He resolved to kill it at the root.

"Young Harold means to marry you, you know," he said. "He spent the majority of our after-dinner sojourn in the smoking lounge swilling brandy and extolling your innumerable virtues. So if you are a revolutionary and rabble-rouser with Sapphic tendencies, like all of Noguchi's other friends, you should let him down now before he develops more of a _tendresse_ than he is already nursing."

Her smile did not dim.

"Let us make one thing clear between us," she said. "Not wanting to marry Harold does not make me a rabble-rouser." A pause, a flush, a twinkle. "It doesn't make me a Sapphic, either. Just in case you were wondering. Good night, Mr. Priest."

"Good night," said Dean to the vanishing swirl of bronze taffeta.

He was surprised to find himself smiling all the way back to his stateroom.


	4. Chapter Four

CHAPTER FOUR

_Cook's Tourist Handbook,_ the old 1884 edition that Dean kept tucked into his luggage and had read a thousand times, described Naples as "ill-built, ill-paved, ill-lighted, ill-drained, ill-watched, ill-governed, and ill-ventilated." Dean found it one of the most beautiful cities he had ever seen, a gleaming mother-of-pearl amphitheater cradling and rising from a protected bay of such exquisite and intense azure that to look too long at it hurt the eyes.

That was from the ship. Once on land, it became apparent what _Cook's_ had been complaining about: the city was noisy, crowded, and in the midst of a monthlong railway strike.

"No one knows how long it will last," wrote Dean to Isabella. "I am told that if I can get to Rome, perhaps the trains in the northern part of the country are unaffected. I plan to hire a car, if I can find a trustworthy driver with a conveyance that is up to the journey."

"Everyone in the city is talking about politics: Giolitti is back in the Prime Minister's palazzo, after being unceremoniously ousted during his first presidency, and is promising to expand the economy and the infrastructure. We shall see if he is more successful this time around. The Neapolitans do not seem unduly hopeful; they have heard too many promises from too many politicians, and have not seen enough changes that benefit them. Nor does the new government have the support of the Pope, who is still smarting from the loss of Rome and the city-states, and refuses to recognize Italy as a unified nation. So we shall see where the wind takes them."

"Most of the passengers traveling on the _Vancouver_ boarded another boat, after barely enough time on land to be fleeced into buying souvenirs of carved coral and volcanic glass (the latter almost certain to be imitation, I dare say), and are presently traversing the Mediterranean toward Nice. I wish them – well, some of them, anyway – sea fever and pirates. The last few days of the passage were rather trying."

"I spent my first afternoon in the lovely Cappella Sansevero, in the center of the old city, to calm my travel-wounded spirit. As many beautiful works of art as that space contains – more than thirty, I should think, if you count the mural on the ceiling and the inlaid labyrinth under your feet – it is difficult to look at anything except Sanmartino's _Veiled Christ._ I am all but indifferent to the myth of the Passion, but even I cannot look at this man under his misty marble shroud, the marks of his torture still apparent on his body and his face taut with pain even in death, and not feel myself suffused with sympathy and shame. There are shackles and pliers and a crown of thorns carved at his feet, so realistic in their barbarism that you might prick your finger upon one of the points. As for the myth that the sculptor was shown how to transmute cloth into marble by the alchemists – that the veil is made of magic, not skill with the chisel – I almost believe it myself. One feels that one could reach out and move it aside with one's hand, it is so thin and finely draped."

" I came away from the chapel feeling all the things that great art makes one feel – humbled and small and yet glorified by having been so close to something so beautiful. And famished, so I found a pizzeria and stuffed myself with one of those extraordinary melted-cheese flatbreads the Neapolitans do so well. For dessert I engulfed a pair of enormous _sfogliatelle_ – one in your honor, and one for myself. I expected to be felled immediately by indigestion, but apparently I have built up my tolerance for heavy Italian pastry until it no longer has any power over me."

"I plan to spend the next few days wandering the city. I may hire a driver to take me out to Pompeii for the weekend; I have seen it before, but continue to be moved by that strange, dead place, calcified in the space between one breath and another. As soon as I can arrange suitable private transport, I will begin to make my way north. I hope to be in Venice within the month."

Dean signed the letter, hesitated, then – half-hating himself for indulging the impulse, added a postscript.

"Out of idle curiosity," he wrote, "what can you tell me about a Bostonian woman named Rosalind Lowell? She purports to be a composer; is she merely a dilettante like the rest of us, or is her work really any good?"

He sent the letter before he could change his mind.

**

It was not as hard to find a driver as Dean feared it might be. The proprietor of the _albergo_ where he was staying – a charming renovated palazzo on Naples' principal seaward promenade, the Chiaja – had a nephew with a car. Yes, he was a good driver, if a bit fast around the corners at times; yes, he could change his own blowouts; yes, _signor,_ the car was reliable, and only two years old, purchased at a discount from an expatriate _inglese_ who had had to leave the country unexpectedly, and young Gianluca would rather drive it than eat or sleep. And what was the world coming to, asked old Gregorio, his hands open to the heavens to signify his bewilderment, what was the world coming to when young men from respectable families would rather tear about the countryside on four wheels than follow their fathers into the fishing business?

Gianluca was duly hired for the day trip to Pompeii, in what Dean privately thought of as his interview for the longer journey to come. He was eighteen or nineteen and handsome after the Neapolitan style: golden-skinned, chiseled of face, heavy-shouldered, black-browed. His hands were scrubbed clean but stained with motor oil about the finger-joints and under the nails, which Dean felt boded well for his ability to repair anything that might go amiss with his vehicle. He spoke little English, but his Italian was not so heavily slurred with the Neapolitan dialect that Dean could not understand it.

The car, a 1901 Ceirano, had an open bench seat and space behind for luggage. They would have to take cover if it rained, thought Dean, but at least the seat was well-upholstered and had a rolled leather back that supported his shoulders, and when he had hoisted himself into the passenger side, there was room at the floorboards for his leg to extend and flex.

All told, it could be much worse.

**

Pompeii – ageless, timeless Pompeii – soothed him in the way it always did. Gianluca, trailing in Dean's limping wake with the lunch basket and the keys to the car, was less impressed.

"This old place," he said with barely veiled contempt. "Stone for a thousand years. What is here to look at but dirt and rocks? What is interesting about dirt?"

"Human beings create in stone because we know it will outlast us," Dean said. "In Pompeii, Vesuvius took over our rôle and became the creator, turning flesh into marble. What better reminder could there be that we are infinitely fragile but also inherently immortal?"

"Rocks," repeated Gianluca, unconvinced. "Italy is full of them."

His true nature emerged, eroding his initial layer of reserve, as he grew more comfortable in Dean's company. By the time their longer journey began, two days after returning from Pompeii – they were to follow the old Via Appia, along which the rail to Rome ran, stopping at each train station they passed until they reached Rome or until the strike ended, whichever occurred first – he clearly considered Dean an old friend. He was accordingly chatty and voluble, steering with one hand while he gestured with the other. Dean, who normally preferred silence in his traveling companions, found him surprisingly good company.

Gianluca was full of questions about America. Was it true, he demanded, that the buildings in New York City were made of glass skins over their metal bones, and that they reached hundreds of feet into the sky? His cousin, who had emigrated two years ago and was now working in a tannery in Brooklyn, had told him in a letter that instead of stairs there were elevators that took you up to the top floors. How did they make the ropes long enough, he wanted to know, and how did they keep them from breaking?

Did Dean go to the moving pictures? Had he seen the movie about the outlaws robbing the train and then being hunted down by the vigilantes, after the scene where the people at the barn dance had made the rich man in the suit dance by shooting at his feet? Did people in America really shoot at you to make you dance?

Had he watched all the way to the final scene where the bad man in the black hat shot straight into the camera until his gun was empty? The look in his eyes, so evil, ah! It chilled the soul. How had the camera kept recording after being shot at so many times, and how badly had the man taking the picture been wounded?

Were cowboys real? Had Dean ever met one? Was _everyone_ in America a cowboy?

He was crestfallen to discover that Dean was from a small city on the eastern coast of Canada, and that he had never so much as seen a cowboy. To cheer him up, Dean told him about his close escape a few years previous from the Righteous and Harmonious Fists of China – leaping, sword-whirling, chanting – and their female counterparts, the Red Lanterns. "They claimed to be able to fly," he said, "and walk on water, and make the bullets fall out of guns by waving their hands in the air. Though personally I never saw them do it."

He spent half an hour telling the story of the Boxer Rebellion: the fleeing missionaries, the Big Swords pursuing them, Dowager Empress Cixi cowering and trapped inside the Forbidden City until she gave into the Fists' demands and declared war on all foreigners. Edward Seymour's British marines pinned down and outnumbered, but fighting free and floating downstream on barges to discover the massive storehouses of the Xigu Arsenal: rice, medical supplies, piles of rifles and ammunition. The Eight-Nation Alliance blanketing China's harbors with ships and guns to force Cixi's surrender.

Gianluca was rapt with attention.

"And Italy also sent troops?" he wanted to know.

"About a hundred."

The bushy black eyebrows shot up. "Only a hundred? A hundred is not very many. Why not more?"

"Perhaps Italy did not have so many missionaries to rescue as everyone else."

"Did Canada send soldiers?"

"No."

"But America did?"

"A few thousand. More than Germany, not as many as France."

"Who sent the most?"

"Japan," said Dean, hoping he was correct.

Gianluca digested this information. "And you saw all this with your own eyes?"

"Some of it, not all. The very beginnings." Honesty compelled Dean to admit, "Before the very bad trouble started, I was well away from there; I read about the big battles later, in the newspapers."

"But you saw the lantern women. You heard them sing their magic songs."

"Yes."

"I suppose," Gianluca said, "that they are just as good as cowboys. If they really can walk on water. And stop the bullets from the guns. Why were you in China? Are you a missionary?"

"Hardly," said Dean. "I just like to travel, that's all."

"Does your wife ever travel with you?"

"What makes you think I have a wife?"

Gianluca's shrug said it all: didn't everyone, eventually?

"I had a fiancée," Dean said, feeling his good mood evaporate. "She ended our engagement not long ago."

"Why?"

"She was too kind to say so," said Dean, "but I believe it was for three very good reasons. I am too old for her, I limp when I walk, and I have a hump on my back."

The words stung him as he said them. Surely, he thought, the fact that they hurt him so much could only mean that they were true.

Gianluca made a dismissive sound.

"You are rich," he said, "and you have seen the world. And you tell the stories that bring up the hair on the back of the neck – you are good at this – so possibly you are good at the stories the women like, as well?"

Surprised, Dean laughed.

"I have my moments, I suppose," he said.

Gianluca smiled. "Then," he said, flexing his gloved fingers on the steering wheel of the Ceirano, "before too very long, there will be another girl." He swept Dean a sideways look. "It is not such a very big hump. I can hardly see it from this angle."

"Thank you," said Dean with heavy irony. Gianluca nodded.

"You are welcome, _signor,"_ he said, adroitly avoiding a pothole. "And now, _allora._ The lantern women, tell me again, for I scarcely can believe it: could they really and truly _fly?"_


	5. Chapter Five

CHAPTER FIVE

When they stopped at Velletri – the southern end of one of the Roman railway lines – they discovered that the strike was over and the trains were running, if not on schedule, at least close to it. Dean, however, found himself reluctant to board. He had been on this line before, and it was not terribly comfortable. Moreover, his bad leg was aching from a week of hard travel and substandard mattresses.

"We'll go on to Tivoli," he told Gianluca, "just for a few days, and recover from our journey at the Acque Albule. Then you can leave me there and return to Napoli; I will be able to make my own way north."

Tivoli was thirty-five miles farther north. They pressed on; in fine weather like this, even slowing to accommodate the mountainous parts of the road, it was barely three hours' drive. By the dinner hour, they were checked into rooms on the _piano terra_ at a spa hotel near the famous thermal springs.

Gianluca disappeared in search of food, wine and probably women; the order and manner in which he planned to locate and secure those commodities remained, thankfully, a mystery. Dean felt too tired to eat and too travelsore to sleep. He entered the baths, shucked his travel-weary clothing, and sank to his chin in bubbling, sulfurous, gray-green mud.

One day, he thought, I will write a travel memoir and title it _The Invalid Abroad._ It will be just like Twain's famous book, but less amusing, and with more space devoted to the locations and comparative merits of therapeutic baths, hot springs, hotels without stairs, and brothels that specialize in massage. Possibly I shall include a chapter on luxurious, superlative breakfasts. If I can find enough really good ones.

He imagined the polished, unflappable Liu facing down a queue of octogenarians in wheelchairs, all clutching his book and demanding private rooms and herbal tisanes. The thought made him laugh.

Maybe not such a good idea, after all.

The mud was silky with pumice and powdered minerals. Immersed in it, Dean felt weightless and disembodied. Even the pungent old-egg smell of it didn't bother him, after the first dozen or so inhalations. He could feel it drawing the poison of the journey out of his body, enticing him down into head-lolling lassitude. He rotated one shoulder, pulling one arm free – the mud surrendered it with an obscene sucking sound – then let gravity pull it down again and watched its faint wake disappear as the mud flowed around and over it.

The persistent ache at the small of his back lessened and dissipated. It would reinstate itself when he stood up, Dean knew, but for the moment he could pretend that it was gone forever.

He closed his eyes and let himself float.

**

Afterwards, an attendant poured warm water over his head – it wasn't really necessary; the mud, after a bit of initial resistance, allowed him to exit and adhered mostly to itself, leaving little to no residue on his body – then, towel wrapped around his waist, walked the few hundred meters to the famous hot spring. The water had the same strong eggy odor as the mud, and was the brilliant, disconcerting blue-green of Atlantic white spruce needles.

Prompted by that color, Dean closed his eyes, leaned back into the warm water, and surrendered to a memory: a laughing, leggy fourteen-year-old Emily tearing through the New Moon spruce barrens with Ilse at her heels, coming up short and pink-cheeked with embarrassment to find him waiting for her in the garden. Her tumbled hair, her rosy face, the improvised bouquet of pine cone-laden spruce boughs in her arms, the way she'd cut her eyes away from his as the hot color rolled over her … he still cherished that image. Probably he always would.

"I came to pay court to Titania," he'd said then, tongue firmly in cheek, "and instead I find a pair of Pucks. Just as well I didn't allow myself to doze, or I might be waking up with donkey's ears."

This salvo sent both Emily and Ilse into paroxysms of inexplicable merriment and a mishmash of half-remembered quotes - they had played an impromptu _Midsummer_ in that very bush a few years ago, with Teddy Kent and the hired boy. Dean knew it was petty to begrudge them their pleasant memory, but couldn't quite help himself from growing colder and more withdrawn, the longer they went on. There seemed no place for him inside their laughter.

"I'll come another time," he'd said stiffly, standing to go, and Emily – still rosy-cheeked with exertion and pleasure – had grabbed his hands.

"By all the vows that ever men have broke," she quoted Hermia gaily, "in number more than ever women spoke, in that same place thou hast appointed me; to-morrow truly will I meet with thee."

"Truly?" he'd said, softening. She could always soften him, especially in moonlight.

"Truly," she said, and gave him one of her slow elfin smiles.

He opened his eyes now in the deep green water, inhaling the humid, sulfurous air and allowing it to pull him back into reality. His lip curled. How much time he'd wasted on that mercurial child, that impossible fantasy.

He would go limping back to her in the blink of an eye if she crooked her finger at him.

_And that, my lad,_ he thought, pulling himself heavily from the water, _is precisely why you must stay away._

**

Next morning's breakfast was not quite the equal of the Parker House's, but it would do admirably if one was hungry, which Dean was. He helped himself to melon and prosciutto, piled olives and thinly sliced hard cheese on his plate, and tossed back the first life-giving mouthful of espresso. Gianluca was nowhere to be seen, which was perhaps just as well.

"Mr. Priest," said a crackly old voice, and Dean looked up to see a vaguely familiar face. The old man from the steamship, he thought, sleeping in that corner chair in the men's smoking lounge with one arm curved around his hat. He cast about in his brain for a name to go with the face.

"Sir Percy," he said after a split second, relief at avoiding a social _faux pas_ making him seem more effusive than he would have otherwise. "Please, join me."

"Thank you, young man. Don't mind if I do."

"What brings you to Tivoli?" Dean asked politely.

"Rheumatism," said Sir Percy. "You'll know a bit about that yourself, I daresay." He cracked the top of his soft-boiled egg expertly and scooped the semisolid yolk onto a slice of baguette. "No proper toast in this country," he said mournfully. "No kippers either."

"Do you often stay at this hotel?"

"It's better than most." Sir Percy ate his improvised toast soldier and sipped some tea. "I'm an invited guest at the Villa d'Este," he said, "only the railway strike delayed my travel by a few days. I hired a private boat in Naples and then took the train from Rome, and got in too late yesterday to present myself for dinner." He eyed Dean sharply. "You should come along with me, Priest," he said. "You're a thinking sort of person; the Cardinal will like you. He collects musicians and artists and people who can enthuse about his paintings and statues without sounding like bores. There'll be proper concerts there, not like that shipboard travesty. And if you haven't seen the old place you should. The frescoes have all been restored and they're a sight for the eyes."

"I don't wish to impose."

"Nonsense," said Sir Percy. "No imposition in the slightest. Be doing me a favor. I bring along a genuine music-lover, I'm off the hook for the concert and can focus on the wine." He winked at Dean. "Best cellar in Europe – it's why I accepted the invitation. Not to mention that it's cooler up here in the mountains. Didn't you find Rome beastly hot, still?"

"It's true," said Dean thoughtfully, "that I've never seen that villa, and by all accounts it's a marvel. And you're sure there's room for me?"

Sir Percy wheezed with laughter. "Damn place is the size of Buckingham Palace," he said. "You could barrack an army there and forget where you put them. No arguments, man, just come along like a good chap. The Cardinal is sending a car for us at ten."

**

Dean located a slightly puffy-looking Gianluca, paid him, retrieved his bag, and said his farewells.

"Come to Napoli again and find me any time," said Gianluca. "Perhaps you will need a driver in America; my cousin says the trains are not so good there." He grinned. "Adventure, it follows you, _signor._ I feel like if I follow you, too, exciting things will also happen to me."

Dean fought a smile and lost. "Would you not miss your family?"

"The family, I would miss," Gianluca said. "Not the fish. I would trade all the fish in the world for the chance to see one single cowboy!"

The Cardinal's limousine was bigger and more comfortable than Gianluca's two-seat Ceirano, and there was a liveried driver who took Dean's bag for him and stowed it with Sir Percy's trunks in the back. The October sky was blue and clear and the air pleasantly warm, and Dean felt loose-muscled and relaxed for once. _This,_ he thought, _is how everyone else feels, all the time._

The car stopped at the bottom of a hill, alongside a curved archway cut into a stone wall. Two young men in livery came forward to open the doors and take their bags. "Your first time, you said, Priest?" said Sir Percy. "Just step through that gate and take a long look."

There were no words, really, Dean thought. How could you tell someone who had never seen this what it was like?

Acres upon acres of what had once been manicured, geometrically spaced _parterres,_ now shaggy and slightly overgrown in a way that elevated their once-formal charm into a wildwood wonderland. Two enormous fountains, one on either side of the central walkway, each feeding a square pool faced in priceless Renaissance mosaics. On their far side, in the center of the garden, a wide shallow waterfall spilled into a massive round basin rimmed in stone benches and shaded with ancient trees; behind it rose a mountain backdrop that must have been artificial but looked for all the world like a hilltop in Mycenae.

Dean turned in a complete circle and caught the silver sparkle of water in motion from every direction. Statuary and carving were everywhere, in granite and marble and bronze: gods and nymphs and satyrs and fantastic beasts; benches and half-walls and tiny deep wells and bird-baths and circular love-seats built in and among the hardscape plants. Hanging vines and darkly looming trees, boxwood hedges grown taller than a man's head, through which birdsong and flowing water could be heard, dappled sunshine here and there glinting off ancient but still vibrant colored glass tile. Cobalt, emerald, carmine, gold.

He lifted his eyes and looked up, beyond the garden. There, there was the villa itself, nearly half a mile away, an imposing square behemoth of grey marble festooned with terraces.

"Quite a thing, eh, Priest?" said Sir Percy, shuffling up behind Dean and leaning on his shoulder. "A long walk, of course, and all up hill; that's the bad part, if you're as old as I am. But it's not hard to look at. No pumps, you know. More than fifty fountains and hundreds of jets, and they all run on gravity." He was wheezing a little, but his color was good – not too high. "They knew how to build to last, back then. Had to divert the river, of course. A bit hard on the town."

"I am not at all sure," Dean said, still openmouthed, "that I have ever seen a lovelier place."

"Well, let's see if you feel the same way after you've made the walk," said Sir Percy. "Rather like swimming the Channel, but you don't get as wet." He stabbed at the terra-cotta tiles with his walking stick and put a little more weight on Dean's arm. "There go the lads with the bags. If we take our time we'll be there just in time for luncheon."


	6. Chapter Six

CHAPTER SIX

**

Dean need not have worried about inconveniencing the Cardinal. The villa had been built in the 1500s to accommodate a full papal retainer of 250, not counting servants, and the present invited company – perhaps forty persons, forty-five at the most – rattled around in its cavernous, echoing rooms like grains of sand in a child’s beach pail. 

Luncheon was a buffet, from which the Cardinal’s guests filled plates and then scattered terrace-ward. Dean could scarcely blame them. Lovely as the frescoes and mosaics inside were, the villa’s true charms lay outside in the grounds.

“I am very sure,” he wrote Isabella later that afternoon, “that you know all about this place and its contents, so I scarcely need describe them to you. I vacillate back and forth between being fascinated by the interior walls – Old Testament prophets to Phoebus on his chariot to a life-sized Renaissance hunt; you need only step through another door to find yourself in another universe – and being repulsed by them. Not a square inch of space is without its fleur-de-lis, its scallop, its tiny grinning imp-head … and all of it in vivid, shrieking color! Whereas one needs only to step out of doors to be soothed by a tone-on-tone palette of fresh growing green, underscored and punctuated by soft grey marble.”

“I am not even disappointed that the water-organ above the central fountain is in disrepair and no longer makes music, impressive as its mechanical madrigals must have been. The simple play of water against stone is exquisite, just present enough to muffle passing voices into murmurs. A hundred conversations could take place in this garden at the same time, and each one would be completely private and contained.”

“You may be amused to learn that at least two of your fellow New Englanders are presently in residence. The famous Mrs. Wharton is here as part of a tour she is making of Italian villa gardens, stalking about with her lantern jaw held a foot in front of the rest of her and scribbling notes; she is under contract to write a travel book and has a deadline to meet. She is such a formidable presence that one is hard-pressed to notice her illustrator, Mr. Parrish, though he is quite as well-known in his own right and is juggling sketchbooks to boot. He is quite as handsome as his pictures, all aquiline nose and cleft chin; it would be easy to dislike him for that alone, if he did not look so thin and unwell. I hear that he is recovering from a bout of tuberculosis, and that before he took this assignment he was in the deserts of Arizona for two years, drying the remains of the disease from his lungs.”

“There is to be a _salon_ tonight in the famous Fountain Room. Sir Percy assures me that the Cardinal’s musical guests are all of impeccable pedigree and peerless quality. Then again, Sir Percy disappeared upon arrival into the Cardinal’s wine cellar and shows no signs of re-emerging, so it is difficult to know how seriously to weigh his artistic opinion. I would name the musicians for you, but I am not acquainted with the ones who are presently here, and I am told that more are arriving this afternoon.”

“I am sure your reply to my last letter is waiting for me at the Villa Barbaro; the fault is mine in allowing myself to be so delayed. I have resolved to be in Venice at least by Carnival. That leaves me a bit more than two months, which seems ample even by my own slow standards … though at the rate I am going, we may very well meet in person in May before I have the chance to read your correspondence.”

**

They dined on mountain trout and saddles of venison, with the usual Italian _accoutrements_ : spongy local cheeses, cured meat, vegetables both pickled and fresh, sunset platters of tomatoes drizzled with olive oil, bloomy purple grapes that changed color when Dean’s fingers touched them. “Winter will soon be upon us,” said Mrs. Wharton, looking flushed and self-satisfied with her afternoon of writing. “So let us raise a glass to the last bounty of summer!”

_“Facciamo un brindisi,”_ they agreed, and drank.

There were more ladies than gentlemen at dinner, so Dean was partnered on either side. He was more than a little relieved that the Countess Perényi was not seated near him. A Hungarian lady of a certain age, she had once met Dean on a short voyage from Varna to Sevastopol, and made it clear that she found his deformities sexually intriguing. He had discovered her in his stateroom, the first night they were at sea, and had nearly been forced to call a porter to have her removed. 

Possibly, Dean thought, she had meant it innocently enough – she was not to know how insulting he found the prospect of being bedded on those terms, nor how often he had encountered like propositions before; there were a shocking number of bored married ladies among the idle rich who harbored a prurient curiosity about his twisted body, and assumed that he would be unusually, ah, _attentive,_ out of sheer gratitude for their interest. Still, he and the Countess now found it difficult to look one another in the eyes, when they happened to meet by chance.

Victor Hugo had a great deal to answer for.

Tonight’s dinner companions did not seem likely to present the same difficulties. On his left sat a rising Russian ballerina named Pavlova who had just been elevated from the _corps de ballet_ to _danseuse_ at the Imperial Ballet; after Dean exhausted his few words of polite Russian and she her sentence or two of English, she turned and struck up a conversation with old Monsieur Petipa, her traveling companion and ballet master.

He had more luck conversing with the lady on his right, a thirteen-year-old British pianist whose teacher had engineered her invitation with the Cardinal. Her name was Julia, though she told Dean that she intended to be called by her middle name, Myra, once she was famous. She was in her first year on scholarship at the Royal Academy in London.

“I study with Tobias Matthay,” she confided in Dean. “He has hardly any hair on his forehead, but his moustache is enormous. I think perhaps the moustache is sapping the strength from the rest of his head.” She took a gulp of her grape cordial. “He is an expert in how the arm works. He is writing a book about it, and he says that I play more naturally when I perform than when I practice. So he has sent me away for a few weeks to travel and play some little bits of concerts, and not to think so much about how I am doing it.”

“Have you had your début, Miss Hess?” Dean inquired. Myra shook her head.

“Not until I am seventeen, Maestro says. Not officially, anyway. That will be in London, with all my family there, and the writers from the newspapers.”

“Do you enjoy performing?” Not all prodigies did, Dean knew.

She considered this. She was small and dark, with tiny hands and a sharp chin and great liquid eyes, and someone had dressed her in lace-trimmed white lawn, to make her seem even younger than she was. “I cannot listen while I do it,” she said finally. “When I do, it is like I’m going to my own funeral. But if I can play and not be a judge in the back of my own head at the same time, it is very much like flying.”

“I have often thought that reading is like flying,” Dean said. “In the middle of a good book, the brain transcends the body and creates its own reality.”

“Yes!” said Myra. “But … it is not exactly the same.”

“Because your body is creating the sound?”

“No, that’s not it,” she said, frowning. “It is not the body that creates the sound, I don’t think. I think it is the brain. The body just does as it’s told.” She grinned suddenly. “Except when it doesn’t. Sometimes it has a mind of its own. Especially my left thumb; it always wants to thump.”

“What will you play tonight?”

“I wanted to play Beethoven,” said Myra. “He is my favorite. But tonight I am playing Franz Liszt, because Liszt stayed here in this house once upon a time and wrote two very famous pieces during his visit. So the Cardinal asked for him especially, because the other pianist who is here tonight, Mrs. Chaminade, only plays her own compositions.”

“Ah,” said Dean, and followed the direction of her glance to the head of the table. It was clear, he thought with amusement, that the Cardinal considered him a social wild card: rich but untitled, Canadian, physically deformed, and an unknown quantity in terms of witty conversation. Therefore, he was seated near the foot of the table, with the little-girl pianist and the minor ballerina, and Edith Wharton and Maxwell Parrish were at the other end with the titled Brits, an old Italian principessa or two, the Countess and her elderly husband, and the more famous musicians – one of whom, apparently, was the wildly popular French composer Cécile Chaminade.

Madame Chaminade was somewhere in her mid-thirties, Dean guessed. One would never know, looking at her, that she was a performing sensation who inspired housewives in Brighton to form music-appreciation clubs bearing her name, nor that her sheet music sold like ice in August; she had soft, undefined features and sleepy, heavy-lidded eyes, and wore a demure high-necked gown of cream-colored chiffon. She was leaning across the table to talk to another woman whose face was turned away so Dean couldn’t see it – a milk-skinned woman in a dark green Reform-silhouette dress, with glossy chestnut braids twisted into a crown on top of her head.

Rosalind Lowell, Dean thought, recognizing the ink-stained forefinger, and was momentarily annoyed, even as he appreciated – from a purely aesthetic viewpoint – the creamy curve of her throat against the rich-hued gown. Was there anyone on the SS Vancouver who had _not_ followed him to Tivoli?

**

Dinner flowed into the cheese course, then to fruit and dessert and coffee. Finally a chime rang from the doorway, and the company – dazed from the _tiramisù,_ still clutching their brandies – filed into the Sala della Fontana. This was the villa’s most celebrated room, frescoed over its entirety with scenes from mythology and still possessed of its original 16th-century fountain on the north wall. It was furnished for the occasion with upholstered furniture in small conversational groups, enough straight-backed chairs and music stands to accommodate a chamber orchestra, and a concert grand Pleyel piano with a shining walnut case, exquisitely carved about the legs and the music desk.

Sir Percy had been right about one thing, thought Dean. This concert was nothing like the one organized by Madame Lumber Magnate.

In place of Minnie-and-Margaret’s butchered _Fledermaus,_ they heard a tenor and soprano from La Scala in Milan, singing the famous arias and celebrated duet from Donizetti’s _L’elisir d’amore_ with chamber-orchestra accompaniment. Instead of the anemic Clementi, there was tiny, precocious Myra Hess playing Liszt’s plangent _Liebestraum_ with full, singing tone, crystalline fioratura, and a left thumb that did not thump. (The old Cardinal was electrified during this, his rheumy eyes alight with nostalgia and joy. Pledged to the Church he might be, thought Dean, but if this man truly worshiped anything, it was music.)

Miss Pavlova obliged them with a scene from _Coppélia._ She, too, was something out of the ordinary, Dean thought – most Russian ballerinas were short and muscular, with pyrotechnical power and lift, but she was willowy and languid; when she rose _en pointe_ he fancied that he could circle her almost-nonexistent ankles with a thumb and finger. Every movement was imbued with intention and melancholy and completely at one with the music in a way that was almost otherworldly in its fragility. He imagined her dancing _Sleeping Beauty_ and shivered.

Other performers followed: a pair of tumblers somersaulted through a comic routine, a British character actor declaimed a monologue from _King Lear._ Madame Chaminade took the piano bench and played her famous Scarf Dance. She was a different creature in performance, thought Dean: fiercely focused, her blandly pretty features sharpening with concentration into something very nearly approaching beauty. If she sang the way she played, he could begin to see how she had started a cult of personality around herself.

“I shall not sing my own songs tonight,” she said after the applause died away, “but rather one written by my colleague, Mademoiselle Lowell, to a poem by Paul Verlaine.”

Ah, yes, thought Dean, and leaned forward in his seat. This should be interesting.

**


	7. Chapter Seven

CHAPTER SEVEN

**

Afterwards, he wished that he could remember what the music had sounded like.

Oh, it was beautiful, and Madame Chaminade had sung it well. But unlike other songs he’d heard – unlike, if he was honest with himself, what he had been expecting from cheerful Rosalind Lowell – the notes she’d written didn’t so much announce themselves as a melody, as wind themselves sinuously around the poem, at once lifting it up and taking it over. 

With the music, the poem became more than it had been without it, and even without that augmentation, it cut too closely to Dean’s soul. He had never been able to read it aloud, and now – hearing it come at him with that searing, searching music attached to it – it was all he could do to stay in his seat.

It was in Verlaine’s French, of course, but he knew the words so well that he scarcely had to translate:

_It weeps in my heart_  
like the rain upon the city.  
What is this languor   
that penetrates my heart?  
Oh, sweet patter of the rain   
on the earth and on the rooftops –  
For a heart which is wearied,   
oh, the song of the rain!  
It weeps without cause   
in this disheartened heart.  
What! No betrayal? …   
This weeping is without reason.  
It is truly the worst pain  
not to know why –  
Without love, without hate –   
my heart knows so much pain. 

**

Madame Chaminade sat down to applause. Dean beat his hands together, as was expected of him, but barely felt the impact. His face felt numb, his body leaden, and inside his chest his heart stuttered and raced. 

The members of the little orchestra returned to their chairs; for a finale, the conductor announced, the concertmaster would perform the first movement of Lalo’s _Symphonie espagnole._ They tuned; the concertmaster entered; the room filled with leaping, dancing violin. Beautiful, Dean thought distantly, but false – what passed for _flamenco_ in a Parisian concert hall. Virtuosic and lovely and meaningless.

It had been a mistake to accept this invitation. It had been a mistake to come here. It was a mistake to be in Italy at all.

How could he have thought that any of this would make the turmoil inside him more bearable? More to the point, if he had traversed half the world and still not left his heartache behind him – if a melancholy melody and a few words from a drunken French poet could rip off the scab that easily and make him bleed again – what use was it for him to go anywhere, or do anything?

Blind and raging and impotent, blood thundering the distant ocean of his own heartbeat into his ears, he waited out the end of the movement and the first wave of applause, conscious only that he was near the back of the room and that the terrace was so close that he could feel the cool draft of air from the doorway. The Cardinal was standing, Mrs. Wharton was standing, and now they were all on their feet, so he could be, too – and even as one of the old Italian princesses turned with a smile to ask him how he had enjoyed the performances, he was blundering away, a few steps, a few more, and then he was out into the night and away from all of them, all of it, everything except himself.

**

How far he walked, he wasn’t sure. There were ramps to stumble down, and staircases, and arches and trellises and great carved blocks of stone in one formation or another, and hissing water all around him, and marble faces looming out of the dark that looked almost human in the moonlight, except for their pallor and their great size. As he got farther from the villa, the path grew rougher and the trees more overgrown. Several times he tripped on loose stones, and once would have fallen outright, except that he caught himself with his hands on the rough-hewn edge of a bench.

His breath was harsh and ragged in his own ears, sounding more animal than human. His face was wet.

He came to a stop, finally, in a wild part of the southwest corner of the garden. Another pool, another statue – this one a gigantic woman with a serene face and … were those multiple sets of breasts she was cupping in her hands? Dean did a double take and looked again. Yes – at least ten pairs, each one pouring water from its nipple.

“This is where I come when I want to be alone,” said a cool female voice. “Find your own solitude, if you please.”

Swiping at his streaming eyes with one sleeve, Dean turned, startled, to see Rosalind Lowell sitting on a bench a few meters away. “I’m sorry,” he said, flustered. “I didn’t know you were here. I wasn’t following you. I’ll go.”

“Wait.” She rose and came closer to him. “It is I who am sorry, Mr. Priest – I thought you were someone else. I didn’t mean that bit of incivility for you.” She peered at his face. “Are you … quite well?”

“Fine,” he said shortly. “I apologize for bothering you.”

“You’ve been weeping,” said Rosalind, “your trousers are torn at the knee, and the palms of your hands – are they bleeding?” She took him by the wrist and turned his hand into the moonlight. “A bit. Some of the stones are rough – it can be perilous to walk in this part of the garden at night, if you don’t know your way around. It hasn’t been restored like the sections nearer the villa.”

“Really, it’s nothing,” said Dean, mortified, but she pulled him down next to her on the bench and produced a handkerchief, which she dipped into the fountain.

“Hold still, do,” she said. “It’s not every man who can say his wounds have been soothed by water from the breasts of Diana of Ephesus.”

He took a deep breath, scrabbling for the tattered remains of his equilibrium. “Is that who the lady is? I was wondering.”

“Mm.” She dabbed at the scrapes. “Queen and huntress, chaste and fair.”

“Now the sun is laid to sleep,” said Dean tentatively, and was encouraged by her lifted eyebrow of surprise. “Seated in thy silver chair, state in wonted manner keep –“

“Hesperus entreats thy light,” Rosalind finished. “Goddess, excellently bright. How well-read you are, Mr. Priest.”

“And you as well.” He hesitated. “Your setting of the Verlaine—“

“Call it ‘pretty’ or ‘charming’ or ‘clever’,” said Rosalind warningly, “and our truce is over; I shall expel you from the grove of the Goddess, wounded or no.” She let out a short, bitter laugh. “I slipped out early from the concert, just so I could avoid hearing any of those awful, well-meaning words; they are like paper cuts on the soul.”

“Quite the contrary,” said Dean. “I found it terribly upsetting.” It must be the moonlight, he thought, that invites such intimacies; I could never bring myself to say this in one of those elegant sitting rooms.

“Upsetting?” she asked, her voice neutral. Dean nodded, and tried to swallow the rawness in his throat.

“Your music,” he said, choosing his words with care, “illuminates the poem, the way a medieval monk dips his brush in gold to bring out a word he loves more than the others. And that poem scours at me until I bleed. I could scarcely bear to hear those words tonight.”

“That is how I felt,” said Rosalind, “the day I set it to music.”

“Your music makes it … worse,” said Dean. “More of what it already was. Too much.”

“I will take that as a compliment.”

They sat in silence. She was still holding his hand.

“Have you ever done anything truly terrible?” she asked him suddenly. “Not merely venal, not the small petty cruelties we expect of one another every day, but something really unforgivable, something that eats at you when you stop distracting yourself from it?”

“Yes,” said Dean, thinking of the pile of ash that had once been Emily’s novel. “Yes, of course. And you?”

“Yes,” she said sadly. “Yes, of course.”

“I am not Quasimodo,” he said. Was there truth serum in Diana’s pool? Why was he telling her this? “I do not love gently and from afar. I am not patient, and devoted, and grateful for the crumbs I am thrown. I am jealous and guarded and vengeful, and every word I speak has a sharpened edge.” He kicked viciously at a pebble under his foot. “And I lose everything and everyone I love most, because I cannot hold them gently.”

“ _Il retaggio d’ogni uom m’è tolto,”_ Rosalind said softly, and Dean laughed.

“The inheritance of this mortal flesh is denied to me,” he translated. “Yes, exactly. I am indeed a Rigoletto; I despise my imperfect body, I laugh because I want to weep, and even as I am surrounded with loveliness and luxury, I cannot help but dwell on the few things that I cannot have.” He turned to her. “And you, Miss Rosalind Lowell: I know next to nothing of you or of what you want, but if you are as miserable as I, you hide it well. I would never in a hundred years have expected that song to come from your pen.”

She was silent for a long time. “I am not miserable,” she said. “Not really. Not most of the time. I am like you – I recognize my fortunate place in the world, and despise myself for wanting more than I have been given.” She trailed the fingers of her free hand in the still water of the fountain. “You are seeing me in a moment of weakness. As I am seeing you.”

“Tomorrow,” suggested Dean, “we will have recovered ourselves.”

“Precisely.” She turned toward him, and Dean could see tears glittering on her eyelashes. “Might I ask a very great impertinence of you, Mr. Priest?”

He tensed, but forced himself not to react. “Of course.”

“It is only that I am very lonely,” she said. “And that our conversation tonight has revealed you to be a … a sympathetic spirit. If you have no objection, for only a moment, I should very much like to be – held.”

**

He realized at once that this was nothing like the Countess Perényi’s advances. Her eyes were wet, their irises almost transparent in the moonlight. He felt as though he could see all the way through her, so clear and direct was her gaze. 

Perhaps she could see into him in the same way. It was that kind of night.

“Come along, then,” he said, in an attempt to lighten the mood, and extended his arm so she could slide into the curve of his shoulder. An instant later, he was holding her.

Her gown was made of merino jersey in a fine weave, soft yet textured against his fingers. He could feel the heat of her body rising through it, and smell the ghosts of tuberoses in her hair. They were almost exactly the same height, but she curled into him and fitted her head on his shoulder, and it felt foreign and surreal and altogether wonderful. 

We are accustomed, thought Dean, to think about women as if they are not quite made of flesh and blood. It is pleasant to be reminded that this is fallacy.

He let his fingers curve protectively around her upper arm. She sighed.

“I should be grateful for the salons,” she said into his chest. “And for Cécile, who was kind enough to sing tonight even though neither the poem nor the music are really to her taste in the slightest; she did it so that everyone there would hear my work. And even for the clumsy compliments, because most of them mean only to tell me that they liked it, and use the words they know are socially acceptable because the ones they are really thinking cannot be said aloud.” She burrowed a little closer. “But I am not grateful. I cannot be.”

“What is it,” Dean asked, “that you want? The thing you cannot have?”

“I am allowed to compose,” said Rosalind bitterly, “but not to publish.”

“Ah,” said Dean.

“I know that compared to many women, I seem to enjoy a great deal of autonomy,” Rosalind said, “but my leash extends only so far. My father’s words, not mine. I sailed from France to Boston expressly to plead my case in person, and this is the result; if I cannot be content with the freedom I have been granted thus far, I will cease to enjoy even that, and will be yanked back across the Atlantic to molder in the attic like Mrs. Rochester.”

“Is he in good health, your father?”

She laughed against his chest. “Are you asking me if he is likely to die soon and give me unfettered access to my funds? You underestimate the Lowell patriarchy, sir. My trust then passes into the hands of his male heir – in this case, my older brother Paul. Unless I marry, in which case my husband is likely to abscond with it and use it to prop up his crumbling manor house.”

“I take it Paul is not a patron of the arts?”

“Of the arts,” said Rosalind. “Of his sister’s involvement in them? No.” She pushed slightly away from Dean and blew her tousled hair from her eyes. “I know full well I am no Mr. Debussy,” she said. “But Paris is full of women who are writing, and writing _well,_ and having their music published and played. Cécile, for one. Auguste Holmès. Madame Viardot did it a generation ago, and ran her salon until she was a very old lady. It is more frustrating than I can express, to be so near to that revolution, and not add to it my own voice.”

“A pseudonym?” Dean suggested. Rosalind shook her head.

“I know people who do that,” she said. “Poldowski, for instance, is really Lady Dean Paul; she chooses to deny both her title and her gender in order to have her music judged fairly on its own merits. But what I write is _mine,_ and I will claim it for myself.”

“I will help you if I can,” said Dean, surprised at himself. “What do you need?”

“Time,” said Rosalind. “Patience. And, I suppose, a suitable husband, who has money of his own and is inclined to let me do as I please.”

**

There was an awkward moment while she considered him, her eyes sharpened. Dean smiled sardonically.

“Suitable, my dear,” he said gently. “I think we both know that I would never do – not for the flower of the Boston Lowells. But I will keep my eyes open as I travel.”

“Thank you,” said Rosalind, and kissed him.

It was meant to be a quick little butterfly-brush of thanks, Dean knew. Certainly it started out that way. But she was so warm and fragrant against him, flushed and pliant with recent tears, and his arms were half-closed around her to begin with; it was a matter of instinct to return the kiss, to accept another when she offered it, and then to give in, just for a moment, to the dark hungry voice inside him that said _deeper_ and _harder_ and _now, longer, more._

The heat took them both by surprise, and he knew that he was not the only one to feel it, because after some giddy unknown passage of time she was on top of him, half-straddling him, her hands threaded through his hair as her mouth slanted hard over his, and the only thing bringing him to his senses was the cold jut of marble in the small of his back as she pressed him back against the edge of the fountain.

She was warm and soft under his hands. There was no corset between them, only a layer or two of fabric. It would be so easy, Dean thought, so _easy ..._

She made a single noise of protest as he pushed her back and away from him, then covered her mouth with her hand, horrified, and slid to the far end of the bench.

**

They stared at each other. Dean was the first to break the long silence.

“I hope to be in Venice by Carnival,” he said finally, his voice shaking. “I am staying with the Curtises in the Villa Barbaro at San Marco, at the behest of Mrs. Gardner.” He swallowed. “Do you know Mrs. Gardner? Do you know the Curtis family?”

Rosalind nodded. “Yes,” she said faintly. “Yes, of course. Our families have been friendly for years.”

“If anyone is able to intercede with your father on your behalf,” Dean said, “it is they. And they are famous patrons of art and music, likely to be sympathetic to your cause.”

“So they are.” She wiped her hands on the skirt of her gown. Her lips were red and swollen, her eyes half-dazed. Dean felt himself pierced through with sheer carnal longing.

“Shall I arrange an invitation for you?” he asked, not quite able to meet her gaze. His laugh was shaky, but he managed one. “We will have two months in the interim. To – to recover our equilibrium.”

Rosalind did not smile as she stood and shook out her skirts.

“I will need every moment of it,” she said. “But – yes, Mr. Priest.”

“Yes?”

“Yes,” she repeated. “I thank you for the suggestion and am grateful for your assistance. And I will see you in Venice.”

He tried not to watch her walk away, and did not quite succeed.

**


	8. Chapter Eight

CHAPTER EIGHT

**

Dean woke up in no mood for conversation. 

He took breakfast in his room, found the Cardinal in the library to thank him for his hospitality and announce his imminent departure, and accepted the offer of a car and driver. An hour later, he was on the morning train to Florence. He felt relieved – almost jubilant – and yet slightly suspicious of how easily he had made his escape, like a sailor on shore leave after a long voyage, or a newly freed prisoner whose parole hearing had gone better than expected.

This was how it should have been from the beginning: a private sleeper compartment, a new translation of Ovid’s _Tristia_ , and a complete lack of itinerary for the next two months. He slipped five _lire_ to the attendant for an extra pillow so he could prop up both his leg and his back comfortably and still enjoy the passing scenery. He had even thought to have the driver stop in the Tivoli market, on the way to the train station, so he could furnish himself with provisions - half a salami, a wedge of hard cheese and another of soft, a package of almonds, four pears, and a small stoppered bottle of the local _limoncello_ – so that if his book engaged him sufficiently, he would not have to stop reading to find the dining car.

The Ovid should have held him, but he could not bring himself to focus on it. Perhaps, Dean thought, he was no longer in the mood for exile and elegy. He laid it aside, after an hour of reading the same page over and over and still not absorbing it, in favor of Arthur Conan Doyle’s newly published short story, _The Adventure of the Empty House._ He fared not much better with that.

“Holmes should have stayed dead,” he said aloud, and ate some almonds even though he wasn’t particularly hungry.

What had happened to him last night?

He poured himself a measure of limoncello, in direct defiance of all the rules of polite human conduct which decreed that one should not imbibe hard spirits before lunchtime, and forced himself to relive the events of the previous night, starting with the concert. That wonderful music, that floating sense of well-being. He had been so supremely content, before Madame Chaminade got up to sing and inflicted Paul Verlaine on him. 

Perhaps, Dean considered, the song had not even been that good; perhaps he would have reacted just as extremely to the same text read aloud.

No, give the devil her due. 

All right, he thought, so it was an effective bit of text setting, and he – teetering on the edge of heartbreak as it was, his defenses lowered to the ground by _Coppélia_ and Donizetti and _Liebestraum_ – had been rendered unusually receptive to its emotional suggestion. That explained his panicked exit from the salon, his involuntary tears, his blind careening through the night garden into the Grove of the Huntress.

Maybe it even explained what had happened after that.

What it did not explain, Dean thought, reaching for the limoncello again, was Rosalind’s reaction to him.

There had been that whiff of flirtation, during the steamship crossing. Not so unusual: women flirted with Dean all the time, the same way they might a prepubescent boy of six or a silver-haired grandfather in a wheel-chair. He was, he thought viciously, _safe._

He had rebuffed her then, attempted to redirect her attention to Sir Harold of the crumbling British manor house, and she had responded with levity and wit. A fine way to save face. Points to her.

But then, sitting by Diana’s pool last night, he had thought their rapport a friendly one. She had touched him, but only to wash his scraped hands with water; she had smiled at him, but with none of the pity or, worse, prurient curiosity, that filled him with both aversion and self-loathing. Their conversation had been, if not exactly conventional, neither sexually provocative in the least. That Ben Jonson poem, lovely as it was, could be embroidered on a sampler and hung in a nursery.

And then she had kissed him, and reduced both of them to cinders. It was a wonder he had made it back through the garden to the villa; certainly he sat alone by Diana’s pool for a long time after she had gone, body buzzing, brain blank with disbelief.

He tried to remember the last time he had kissed a woman, and came up only with a near-miss: Emily, in the moonlight near the Disappointed House, looking as though if he tried she would not push him away, looking indeed almost as if she might want him to. He had gone home, afterwards, full of both self-loathing because he had not pressed her, and cautious optimism for their next meeting.

Optimism had never served him very well.

But before that, before that. He sifted through his meager bank of sexual encounters – a few youthful affairs, before he grew wary of the motives of women too eager to see him naked; a steady string of attentive-but-disengaged paid companions – and arrived at the misty, indistinct childhood memory of a sweet-smelling woman in pale blue who had arranged the sheets at his shoulders, and caressed his cheek, and stooped to lay her lips on his forehead.

A governess, perhaps – they had come and gone, after his parents were dead. Or perhaps a neighbor, the mother of a friend. _Poor little thing,_ she’d said, thinking him asleep. He had lain in the dark after she turned out the light, burning with indignation but also half-mad for her to come back and smile at him again. Cool hands, kind eyes, smell of rosewater and lavender.

A knock at the door roused him from his rêverie.

“I have everything I need,” he called from where he sat. “You needn’t knock again before we reach Florence.”

“Per favore, signore,” someone said. A very young someone, from the sound of it; the voice was high-pitched and childish. _“Per favore, aprire la porta.”_

Curious, Dean laid his cushions aside and crossed the few steps to the door. On the other side was a boy of about ten, dressed in neat but faded clothing. The toes of his shoes were wiped clean of dust, but he had forgotten about the backs. He carried a covered basket.

“Please, sir,” he asked in Italian, “do you want a puppy?”

“I’m sorry, no,” Dean said, attempting to close the door. The boy stuck his foot in the way.

“You only say that,” he said, “because you haven’t seen them. They are so pretty, and so well-behaved. My dog Chiara is the mother, and she is the best dog in the world.”

“I’m sure they’re very nice puppies,” Dean said. At the other end of the corridor, a porter paused with a tray of empty plates on his arm to consider the situation and register the boy’s presence. He and Dean made eye contact. “But I’m not interested. _Non sono interessato.”_

“Please, _signor,”_ the boy pressed, undeterred. “My father says he will drown them if I do not find them homes today.”

“Does he know you are on the train?”

“How else am I to find them good homes? Everyone in Tivoli has more dogs than they want already.”

This, Dean thought, was probably true. “How did you get into the first-class car?” he asked. “Do you even have a ticket?”

The boy’s eyes shifted guiltily from side to side. Behind him, the porter – having laid down his tray of empties – was advancing on them, with as much stealth as a man of his girth could muster. 

Dean made a decision. Possibly, he thought, I am insane.

“Here, sir,” he called to the porter. “My nephew needs a ticket.”

The porter’s eyes rounded comically. “Your … nephew, signor?”

“Indeed,” Dean said crisply, and produced a banknote. “ _Andate, e ritorna_ – he will be returning to Tivoli tonight.”

The porter snatched the note adroitly from the air and made it disappear.

“ _Allora,_ ” he said. “I will alert the _controllore_. May I bring the _signor_ and his … nephew … some refreshment?”

Dean glanced down. The boy was very thin.

“Lemonade,” he said, “and panini. And some _biscotti_ if you have them.”

“Very good, _signor.”_

The porter disappeared. Dean and the _ragazzo_ exchanged glances.

“Well,” said Dean, holding open the door. “Are you coming in, or are you not?”

**

The boy’s name was Paolo. He engulfed two sandwiches, trying not to let Dean see that he was saving bits of them in his napkin for the dogs.

“I’m still not interested in a puppy,” said Dean. “But you had might as well let them out of the basket. They must be terribly restive by now.”

“They are quiet, _signor,”_ protested Paolo. “My dog Chiara, she never barks unless a stranger comes to the door. And then she stops right away if you tell her to.”

Dean, preparing to launch into a litany of reasons why a dog who barked at strangers would be a major impediment to international travel, saw two tiny long-nosed heads pop up from the rim of the basket, and was silenced.

“Why,” he said, surprised into English, “they’re Italian greyhounds.”

_“Pardon, signor?"_

“ _Piccoli levrieri,”_ Dean translated. “An ancient breed. Catherine the Great, who ruled Russia for thirty years, had her portrait painted with one. Its name was Zemire.” He studied the puppies for a moment. One of them was scrabbling at the edge of the basket. The other puppy remained still, looking back at him with dark eyes that were huge and alien in its narrow face. “Your dog, Chiara. Is she a large dog?”

Paolo held his hands apart. The distance was about the span of his skinny waist. “She is smaller than my friend Marco’s dog,” he said. “Much smaller. She can almost walk under his belly. But she is a good hunter. She is fast, and good at killing rats.”

Dean could not deny that he had, on occasion, traveled to places where a rat-killing dog would have been very useful. “I had a dog once,” he said. “He had long golden hair and a very soft mouth. He was bred for swimming and for retrieving birds.” He thought of Tweed and smiled. “He was very good company – though too big to accompany me when I traveled. He stayed with my sister during the winters, and let her children gnaw on him and pull his fur. A very patient beast.”

Paolo, sensing an opportunity, swallowed the last of his lemonade and plucked the quieter puppy from the basket. “This one, _signor,”_ he said. “She is the smallest of the litter. See how she almost fits in one of my hands. She could go with you anywhere and be no trouble. She will sleep on your pillow, if you want her to.” He held her out to Dean. “She likes you already,” he said. “I can tell.”

The puppy was the smoke-grey color that dog enthusiasts called ‘blue’, with subtle flecks of silver-white on her muzzle and chest. She had the long-legged, fine-boned look of an Egyptian cat deity; her fur was satin and sleek, but not dense, and she shivered in Dean’s hands. Almost automatically, he drew her closer to warm her, and she snuggled against his chest with a tiny sigh of contentment. She felt impossibly fragile, all legs and heartbeat.

This is a bad idea, he thought. You are not just possibly insane, you are through the door of the madhouse and halfway to the padded cell. How do you expect to shepherd even your own broken self through Italy, much less this bird-boned little creature?

_“Quanto è?”_ he asked Paolo, and saw the boy’s eyes shift again in momentary calculation, before he finally shrugged and shook his head.

“Free to a good home,” he said. “I did not want to see her die. And you bought my ticket – the porter would have thrown me off at the next town otherwise.” He paused. “And also lunch. It was a very good lunch.”

Dean dug in his pocket for _lire_ and dropped a few coins into Paolo’s palm. “The porter will let you stay on the train for the return trip,” he said. “I will see to it. But you will need to buy dinner. And perhaps, if you arrive home with money, your father will see that there is value in the other little dog and not drown him.”

The boy’s eyes shimmered. _“Grazie, signor.”_

_“Prego,”_ said Dean, still cradling the puppy. She blinked sleepily against his palm. Her eyelashes were very long.

After the boy was gone, he carried her back with him to the bunk and propped up his leg again. “My pillows are my own,” he said sternly to her. “Perhaps you were allowed certain liberties in Tivoli, but do not take me for a pushover, just because I could not bring myself to have you drowned.”

The puppy curled into the curve of his elbow and snored delicately. She was very warm.

Dean picked up his Ovid and began to read.

**


	9. Chapter Nine

CHAPTER NINE

**

He named the puppy Alba. She was the color of the sky just before it lightened with sunrise. And, like her namesake, she was an early riser. Dean liked to be woken gradually and at a civilized hour, preferably after someone else had already seen to the coffee, and was therefore dismayed when, at precisely five thirty-three on the first morning of their acquaintance, a narrow wet nose inserted itself into his ear canal and nudged – not hard, but repeatedly and inexorably. Time, declared the nose, was wasting.

Their hotel room was on the ground floor of the _albergo_ and faced the central courtyard. Dean belted himself sleepily into a dressing gown and carried Alba outside through the terrace doors, where she squatted politely behind a shrubbery. Dean, remembering Tweed’s puppy days, praised her in a lavish undertone.

“Well,” he said at last, scooping her up before she could get too interested in the little fishpond in the center of the courtyard, “shall we go back to bed?”

Alba declined this offer. A night’s sleep had restored her energies; she tore around the room like a baby gazelle, leaping and cavorting and changing direction midair, her fragile front legs stiff with excitement. Eventually she fetched up against the door and fixed Dean with an imploring look, bat-ears folded back flat against her tiny skull, one silken paw lifted and drooping in mute appeal.

“We will need to find you a collar,” Dean said, improvising with a pair of boot laces. “And I will warn you now, _ragazzina_ – as charming as you are, you need expect no civil conversation from me before breakfast. You will have to enjoy the mornings for the both of us.”

**

They stopped in Florence two days longer than Dean had originally planned, strolling the low stone bridges over the Arno and idling at café tables. “I am writing this from the edge of the Piazza della Signoria,” he wrote to Isabella on the final day of their stay. “The tourists have mostly deserted this square – it was almost chilly this morning, if you can believe it – and left it to the students, who sprawl across every available surface arguing with each other and swilling Aperol spritzes. But I can only see the great bonfires when I look out across its great expanse; the old cobblestones seem still stained by their soot. In the right light I fancy that I can smell smoke and see the ghostly slick of oil paint, running like blood into the gutter. Who knows what masterpieces were lost to us in that disaster?”

Alba, perched in the leather bag with the long cross-body shoulder strap that Dean had purchased expressly for her conveyance, distracted him from this macabre thought by commencing to delicately gnaw a button from the sleeve of his jacket. Dean rescued the button and distracted her with a bit of his panini crust. It would not keep her attention for long; he must finish the letter quickly.

“My new traveling companion and I are bound for Verona next,” he wrote. “Cook’s is fairly dismissive of Shakespeare’s favored city, advising that its best features can be seen in a single day, but having taken that quick tour some years ago, I find myself inclined to linger this time, at least through the end of the Filarmonico’s November season. I have an old acquaintance there who specializes in short-term apartment rentals and gouges no more than can be expected, and he has found rooms for me a street away from the Piazza Brà, near the Castelvecchio.”

Alba made another grab for the button. Dean twitched his sleeve out of her reach and scrawled the Verona address at the bottom of the page.

“I suppose,” he said severely, flapping the page to dry it and folding it into its envelope, “that you think yourself very clever. Shall we put you on the ground again, and see if you have gotten any better at walking on the leash, rather than chewing it?”

She had not. Dean conceded that she was a bit young to walk on a leash, even if it was a cobweb-thin bit of buttery calfskin custom-made for her in the famous San Lorenzo leather market. He compromised by staying put at his table and allowing her to charge in joyous circles around his feet. Better that she tire herself out tonight, if such a thing was possible; tomorrow they would be on the train most of the day.

He had been worried about taking a puppy on another eight-hour train journey, but she was a good traveler – quiet, as Paolo had promised, tidy in her habits, and inclined to cuddle. Dean had resigned himself to a dogless existence post-Tweed because it had been hard on both of them to separate for months out of the year – and because he remembered how much energy a retriever puppy both expended and required. Alba seemed content with a quarter-hour’s mad dash around the room, now and then, after which she curled herself into a small grey croissant, as near to him as she could get, and slept. Dean dropped a few coins into the hand of the likeliest-looking porter, who then arrived to walk her outside at the train’s longest station pauses.

“When we arrive in Verona,” he promised her, “we will find you a basket. And then—“ shaking his finger in mock outrage – “ _then,_ I shall reclaim my pillow.”

**

He had originally thought to press on to Venice straightway from Florence. His unsettling encounter with Rosalind Lowell in the Tivoli gardens had changed his mind. Better, he thought, to stay off the beaten path until Carnival, to avoid the Curtises and the surrounding nebula of artists and musicians that constantly peopled the lovely rooms of the Villa Barbaro. And besides, he had not seen Fabrizio and Maddalena for years; it would be pleasant to catch up with old friends.

Fabrizio met them at the Porta Nuova train station – tall, dark-haired, with Italian good looks that passed for distinguished until he smiled and his face burst into homely good humor. “Dino!” he cried, and embraced them. Alba squeaked in protest.

“And who is this _piccola signorina_?” Fabrizio plucked her from her bag and held her up. “A souvenir from your journey? _Bella, bella, bellissima_ , you funny little thing, Maddalena will eat you up. Dino, it has been so long! Here, _allora,_ you may take your _cucciolo tenero,_ and I will carry your _valigie._ Dino, Dino, you are here at the perfect time; it is not so hot, and the Filarmonico is staging _Lucia di Lammermoor,_ it opens next week, and who do you think is the Lucia? My Maddalena, she is the leading lady of my heart, but also on the stage, and you shall see her in her triumph!”

Their conveyance was an open cart pulled by a pair of ponies, one light grey, the other dun. “Sole and Luna,” Fabrizio said by way of introduction, slinging Dean’s suitcases into the back of the cart. “Dino, Dino, life has been so good to us, has it not? But we have scarcely seen you since our wedding.” He cast a glance at Dean’s left hand. “But where is your ring, where is your bride? The last time you wrote, you said she was ill and you were staying in Canada to be near her.” 

“Ah—“

Fabrizio’s eyes rounded in horror so palpable that it almost made Dean laugh. “Oh, Dino,” he said sorrowfully, “ _sono un idiota_. Did she not recover? And here I am, clumsy, pulling up old bad memories. _Mi dispiace, amico mio._ ”

Dean laughed. It was not, he thought with surprise, even very much effort. “She is well,” he said lightly, pulling himself up onto the bench seat of the cart. “We decided that we would not suit, after all.”

Fabrizio frowned. “But—“ he began, then stopped himself with visible effort. “You do not want to talk about it,” he said. “Ah, Dino, your heart is broken, I can see it. My friend, I am sorry.”

“Italy is comforting me,” Dean said, and Fabrizio brightened.

“Of course!” he said, slapping the reins over the backs of the ponies. “That is what she does, _Italia._ You, you who are so well-traveled, surely you know this, that this is the only place to live. The sun, the wine, the melons, the statues, the beautiful women, the pasta.”

“In that order?” Dean inquired. Fabrizio laughed.

“ _Ma no,_ ” he said, clucking to the ponies. “The pasta, that should be much higher up on the list. Come now, I shall take you to Maddalena, and she will feed you a meal that will make you see God.”

**

They were, Dean decided, the happiest musicians he had ever met. 

He sat in the kitchen of their apartment – candlelit now, but sun-flooded during the day – ate figs and prosciutto and _bolognese_ , and marveled at them. Maddalena was lovely enough, small and plump, with dark curls down her back, but nothing about her said _diva_ to him; it was difficult to imagine her as the grief-maddened, blood-spattered Lucia. And affable Fabrizio went to the theater every day to sit at a piano or wave a baton; surely he was not so easy-going as this, in front of his orchestra?

They were married three years now, he thought. Three years, living together, working together every day, disagreeing no doubt as any couple did from time to time, and yet they billed and cooed and twittered at each other like newlyweds. He drank some more wine, watched Fabrizio kiss his wife’s hand from across the table until she blushed, and wondered what it would really have been like, to live with Emily.

Say nothing of that, he thought. What would it have been like for her, to live with you?

Alba nudged his hand with the top of her bony little skull. He fed her a scrap of prosciutto, lost in rêverie.

“My friend, you are dreaming,” said Fabrizio ruefully. “We have kept you so late, and on such a day of travel! It is selfish of us; we are starved for your company. Come, the apartment is only a few steps. I shall find you the key, and we will let you rest.” He pushed back his chair and dropped a kiss on the top of Maddalena’s head. “I will return to you,” he murmured, “very soon.”

They strolled together down the ancient marble-paneled street. It was nearly eleven o’ clock, but the sidewalk tables were jammed with diners and drinkers; it had been a sunny day, and the stones still held some of the sun’s warmth. “This place sounds like happiness,” Dean said, mostly to himself, and Fabrizio bumped his arm in agreement.

“Why you ever go away from us,” he said, “I will never understand. Here, here is the apartment. It is not large, but there is a great deal of sun, and the garden is a beautiful thing; it was planted a thousand years ago, and Signora Abruzzi, who has the opposite apartment on the other side of the courtyard, maintains it. There are only the two apartments who share the garden.” He cut his eyes sideways at Dean. “She is a _strega vecchia,_ ” he whispered, “for sure. And her old cat, it would eat your little dog and spit out her bones, so do not let her run unattended outside. But—“ he winked—“there is a daughter. To look at her will make you glad that God invented women. Her name is Giuditta; she sings with the opera chorus.”

“As usual,” said Dean dryly, “you think of everything. But I am not in the mood to pursue women during this trip.”

“This woman,” said Fabrizio, “if she takes the thought into her head, may very well pursue you. She is a free spirit, Giuditta.” He laughed and dropped a key into Dean’s palm. “Dino, Dino,” he said with affection. “To think that you are here, from so far away, to see Maddalena sing Lucia! My friend, the world is a wonderful place.”

As for that, thought Dean, he was still making up his mind. Certainly, however, this apartment was wonderful, all moonlit shadows streaming in through the courtyard windows and cool travertine under his fingers every place he touched. He found his way into the bedroom, shucked his clothes, and let them – for just this once – lie where they fell. The bed was soft and newly made and smelled of sunshine and lavender. His head was fuzzy from the wine; he had drunk more than was usual for him.

“In the morning,” he told Alba, “we shall see—“

He was asleep before he could finish the sentence.


	10. Chapter Ten

CHAPTER TEN

**

He saw less of Fabrizio and Maddalena than he had thought he would; they were in technical rehearsal and run-throughs, out at the theater half the night, and resting during the day to conserve their energies. Similarly engaged, it seemed, was the toothsome Giuditta, though he did see her mother, old Signora Abruzzi, from time to time, pinching back plants in the stone parterres of the central courtyard and skimming fallen leaves from the fountain. Alba encountered the Abruzzis’ cat – a lean, evil-eyed tabby with tattered ears – and survived with only a superficial scratch on the nose to show for it.

Dean was grateful not to be on a train. The air was crisp and autumnal – pleasantly warm under the sun, pleasantly cool at night. He bought a cheap panama hat from a tourist stall near the Porta Borsari and spent his mornings exploring the streets of the oldest part of the city, marveling at the finely chiseled pavers under his feet, quarried and laid the year that Christ was born, and lunching on figs and cheese from the market stalls in the Piazza Erbe. Most afternoons, he parked himself at an outdoor table in the quiet Piazza dei Signori under the elegant Renaissance façade of the Loggia del Consiglio, and drank icy, sweating aperol cocktails while Alba, freed from the leash, raced in dizzy joyful puppy-circles around the grave marble statue of Dante Alighieri.

If he were more ambitious, he would slog through _Inferno_ again, maybe not in translation this time. Instead, he chose to revisit _Paradise Lost_ , which he loved beyond all reason and read with the same repetitive veneration that his more devout relatives saved for _Pilgrim’s Progress_ and the King James Bible. It was _Paradise Lost_ , truth be told, who was to blame for the most scurrilous and enduring rumor that blackened his reputation in Blair Water; as a young man in his twenties, he had unwisely confessed to an admiration for Milton’s bitter, flawed, all-too-human Lucifer. By the time this had been passed around and come back to him, he was branded a devotee of devil worship, down to the cloven foot and the pentacle secretly branded on his hump.

“Idiots,” Aunt Nancy Priest had said, and laughed. “A lot they know; you’re the only one of us who will ever go to Heaven, Jarback, even if it’s only because no one’s ever invited you to sin.”

But that was no matter now.

The last time he had read the Milton through had been aloud to Emily, two winters ago. Emily, pale and wasted, her foot wrapped, her thin body propped on pillows; Emily, hollow-eyed with the new and unwelcome knowledge of physical infirmity and betrayal. Dean had sat every afternoon with her, under the distrustful eyes of her suspicious aunts, and read into her ears those beautiful, half-heretical words. Now, he steeled himself against unwelcome memory and read them again, reclaiming them for himself alone.

_Solitude sometimes is best society._

_O sun, to tell thee how I hate thy beams, that bring to my remembrance from what state I fell, how glorious once above my sphere._

_Abashed the devil stood and felt how awful goodness is, and saw Virtue in her shape how lovely: and pined his loss._

Dean closed the book and stood up. Alba, a hundred yards away on the far side of the statue, flung herself joyously through a kit of perturbed pigeons, scattering them aggrieved to the air, and arrowed toward him. She had an endearing way of racing up to him and inserting her sleek head into the cup of his palm. She did this now, and as always, it made him smile.

“No more dancing,” he said to her, drawing a bill from his pocket and leaving it on the table for the waiter. “The Borsari is too crowded for you to walk without the leash. No, don’t pull, _piccola,_ you will strain your neck, and besides, it is not becoming of a lady.”

They threaded their way through the market and back toward the old gate, stopping for a gelato from a street vendor. It was strawberry today – _fragola_ in Italian, a word Dean loved because it made him think of 'fragrant', and truly it was, sweet and heady and almost overripe, the essence of summer in a paper cup. He dabbed a bit on Alba’s nose and watched her lick it off. His head was full of words – he’d closed the book before his eyes could register them, but it didn’t matter because he’d had them memorized for years:

_How can I live without thee, how forgoe_  
_Thy sweet Converse and Love so dearly joyned,_  
_To live again in these wilde Woods forlorn?_  
_Should God create another Eve, and I_  
_Another Rib afford, yet loss of thee_  
_Would never from my heart; no no, I feel_  
_The Link of Nature draw me: Flesh of Flesh,_  
_Bone of my Bone thou art, and from thy State_  
_Mine shall never be parted, Bliss or Woe._

**

The night before _Lucia di Lammermoor_ opened at the Filarmonico, Fabrizio arrived at Dean’s door at ten p.m. with a bottle of wine and two panini wrapped in newspaper.

“It is a dark night in the theater,” he explained. “The singers, they must not sing, they must not talk. Maddalena, she must rest more than anyone else; she has been in bed for an hour already. But me, Dino, I have the conductor’s nerves, the flutter in the belly, and cannot sleep, not yet. You will come out and talk with me? The cucciolo, she can come too. She will like this place.”

They walked the block and a half to the Piazza Brà and stood in its green tree-shaded quiet, staring up at the jagged hulk of the Roman arena against the night sky. “It is so big,” Fabrizio said, “and so old. Have you been inside?”

“No, not yet.”

“Come. I will show you.”

They went in one of the side entrances, through an ancient stone arch, and climbed the rough hand-hewn stairs – slowly, in Dean’s case, though each step was wide enough that he could pull himself up before attempting the next. When they came out into the moonlight, they were halfway up the side of the coliseum; there was a broad path running all the way around that separated the upper banks of granite bench seats from the lower. They sat down on the lowest bench of the upper section and leaned back. The stone had absorbed the heat of the sun during the day and was still warm.

“It will seat twenty thousand people,” Fabrizio said, expertly pulling the cork on the bottle with an opener from his pocket. “A marvel, is it not, Dino?”

“A marvel,” Dean agreed. He was staring down into the vast central field, imagining troops of soldiers playing at war there. “Is it true that the Romans diverted the Adige and flooded it on purpose?” he asked. “So they could simulate water battles?”

Fabrizio shrugged. “So they say,” he said, swigging from the bottle and handing it over to Dean. “But war, ancient history, pah. What a theater it would make!”

“For opera?”

“Why not? The acoustics are good. And even if there was a stage – there –“ he waved toward one of the narrower ends of the big oval – “there would still be enough seating for all of the city.” He sighed happily. “You could stage _Carmen_ with a real bullfight,” he said. “Elephants for _Aida._ Imagine it! Verona would be the center of the universe for opera – there would be nothing else like it anywhere in the world.”

“You would be at the mercy of the weather,” Dean said. Fabrizio waved this away.

“Summer only, of course,” he said. “The downbeat of the orchestra just at sunset. Music under the stars, Dino, with nothing to stop one from meeting the other. Surely the great composers would smile down on us from Heaven and approve.”

Alba was nearly out of sight, a tiny intrepid figure trotting along the mezzanine walkway. Dean called to her, and she came galloping back. He rewarded her with a bit of _bresaola_ from his sandwich.

“And you,” he teased Fabrizio, “in your white tie and tails, waving the baton.”

“That is too big a dream for me,” Fabrizio said, shaking his head. “I cannot even imagine.”

They traded the bottle back and forth and ate their panini. Out on the street, Dean knew, the city had come out to dine and socialize. But the massive stone walls blocked out the sound of distant conversation and laughter; inside the arena, it was as quiet as a cathedral, lit only with moonlight and the occasional spark of a stray firefly, down on the ground level.

“It feels,” he said, slightly lightheaded from the wine, “as if time is not passing here.”

“Ah?”

“These stones,” said Dean, “are here, as they were here a thousand years ago, and they have not changed.” He shook a finger at the vast empty expanse of the arena. “And while we are inside them, we do not change either. We will go down those stairs and out onto the street, and the world will have moved on without us; we will be strangers in a strange land.”

“This is impossible,” said Fabrizio, emptying the bottle.

“How do you know?”

“Because I have my Maddalena,” he said, “and she knows that I come here sometimes to look at the stars and dream of open-air opera. And if she wakes in the morning and I am not beside her, she will come and find me.”

Dean laughed. “True enough,” he said. “How fortunate you are, my friend.”

“Love,” said Fabrizio, “is a thing that I wish also for you. You will not be complete without it.”

“I loved,” said Dean, “and it did not make me feel complete. It made me feel loneliness and hunger and, even more terribly, hope. And then it betrayed me, or I betrayed it, I am not always certain, and broke my heart. I am done with it.”

“Love does not make you feel those things,” said Fabrizio with authority, “if it is true love. You want the fire that warms, not the one that burns you up.”

“Fire is the same fire whether it is large or small,” countered Dean. Fabrizio shook his head.

“No,” he said, throwing out an expansive hand. “No, I am quite sure of this. To say that all love is the same is to say that a wolf and a dog are the same.” He held out the last crumb of his sandwich to Alba, who took it delicately from his fingers. “The wolf knows only its own hunger, so it takes what is offered and your hand with it,” he said. “The dog, who loves, takes what you can offer and stays by your side, hoping that some day you will offer more.”

Dean shook his head. “We are both too drunk to have this conversation,” he said. “Nor do I think that any woman, even your long-suffering Maddalena, would thank you for comparing her to a dog.”

Fabrizio laughed.

“I do not have the right words,” he conceded. “But I know what I know, Dino. When you find the right one, she will bring you joy and not sorrow. And then you will understand that what you thought was love before was not that at all.”

**

They lingered until the stones beneath them began to cool, then found their way down the winding stone steps and out onto the street.

“I think perhaps I will now sleep,” said Fabrizio. He was weaving slightly as he walked. “Thank you, _mio fratello,_ for keeping me company. I will conduct tomorrow night with no fear of the claques or the critics, and I have you to thank for this.” He paused by his door. “There is a ticket for you,” he said, “in the box office. And after, there is a dinner for the cast. You will come?”

Dean hesitated, then nodded. “Of course,” he said. “I would not miss it.” 

“Until tomorrow, then,” Fabrizio said. _“Domani.”_

_“Domani.”_

**


	11. Chapter Eleven

CHAPTER ELEVEN

**

Dean woke up later than usual the next morning. Sun was streaming in at the windows. His head felt clogged and woolly and there was a sour taste in his mouth. That, he thought, would teach him to try and keep up with Fabrizio glass-for-glass. 

Alba was not on the bed, nor did she come when he called her. When he managed to hoist himself to his feet and lurch into the kitchen, he discovered why: there was a small yellow puddle on the marble tile next to the closed terrace doors, and the parcel of garbage he had placed on a chair, ready to be taken out, had been surgically removed from its wrappings and redistributed across the open expanse of floor. Alba herself was behind a curtain in the corner, gnawing furtively on a rind of pancetta. When she saw him, she swallowed hastily, then flattened her ears in apology and raised one front paw so that it dangled pitifully from its fragile wrist.

“That would be more effective,” Dean told her sternly, “if you did not have grease on your whiskers.”

Alba whined.

“Yes,” said Dean, “I am quite aware of my own culpability in the situation. If I had woken at a normal hour to let you out and feed you, you would not have had to fend for yourself.” He fetched a broom from the corner and began to sweep up the mess. “You smell like the alley behind the Liverpool train station,” he said, wrinkling his nose. “You must have rolled in the garbage before you ate it. I wonder: have you ever had a bath?”

**

It was fortunate, he thought, that she was small enough to fit in his wash-basin. He lathered her with his shaving-soap, poured a pitcher of tepid room-temperature water over her head to rinse her, and wrapped her in a towel. Wet, she felt more tiny than ever, a shivering baby chick just out of its egg. He tucked in the ends of the towel more firmly and carried her out to a bench in the sunny courtyard. She lay contentedly on his lap, belly up and paws waving, and closed her eyes as he rubbed her dry.

_“Buon giorno, signor,”_ said a low amused voice, and Dean looked up to see a woman leaning against a column on the other side of the courtyard. This, he thought, could only be Giuditta. She had sleepy dark eyes and tumbled black hair pulled over one shoulder, and was belted into a peacock-blue silk dressing gown that managed to reveal almost everything about her body while showing no skin at all. Her feet were bare.

_“Buon giorno,”_ he said, immediately wary. “I apologize for disturbing you, _signorina.”_

“You don’t bother me,” said Giuditta, and advanced a few more steps into the courtyard. “What a strange little animal,” she said, peering down at the blissful Alba. “Are you certain she is a dog? Old Pazzo, our cat, has killed bigger rats than her.”

“You named your cat Pazzo?”

“Can you think of a better name for a cat?” Giuditta hoisted herself up to perch on the lip of a nearby stone planter; it was positioned just far enough away from his chosen bench for her to grip the bench’s edge with her bare toes. “You are good fortune for me, _signor,”_ she said, smoothing the silk over her lap.

The side of her foot was brushing his thigh. Dean shifted to put an inch of space between them. “Oh?”

“For two years, I have sung here with the opera chorus,” she said. “I was a soloist in Lugo, and thought this contract would be more advantageous. But I have been an understudy time and again, and never had so much as a single solo line to myself.” She smiled and tossed her head. “And now, only a few weeks after the mysterious _inglese_ moves in next door, I wake up on opening night to discover that Bettina has fallen down and broken her ankle, and I am to sing the role of Alice.”

She said ‘Alice’ in the Italian way, in three caressing syllables, and looked so genuinely pleased for a moment that Dean softened toward her. “Are you quite certain,” he said dryly, “ that you were not behind Bettina when she began to descend the stairs?”

Giuditta laughed, unrepentant. “Not this time,” she said. “Another year, and it might have come to that.” She reached up to pull her hair over her shoulder again, combing it with her fingers. “You are the very good friend of the maestro and his little prima donna,” she said. Her eyes were bright and assessing. “Did you really travel all the way to Italy to hear her sing? That is what they are saying, in the chorus.”

“That, among other reasons,” said Dean.

“How fortunate you are,” Giuditta said, smiling, “to be able to cross the wide ocean only for this. No doubt our little production will pale in comparison to the great ones you have seen elsewhere.” She tipped her head to one side, studying him. “Will you be at the opening performance tonight?”

“Yes.”

_“Bene,”_ said Giuditta. “You will be my good-luck charm, I am sure of it.”

Dean laughed shortly. “Believe what you like,” he said, “but also believe this: I have never brought any woman good fortune yet.”

Giuditta pointed her toes, unsettling the silk of her robe so that it shivered and slid to either side, revealing her shapely bare legs to the mid-thigh. Unhurriedly she reclaimed one side of her skirts, then the other, bunching them in her hands over her knees and holding Dean’s gaze with her own when he would have flushed and looked away. “You are right,” she said. “Good luck, pah. We make our own, do we not?”

She let her toes slip from the bench and parted her thighs slightly, so that as she let go of it the bright blue silk fell to outline the bulge of her mons against the edge of the planter. It was a practiced move, no doubt, but no less effective for that; the sight of her open and splayed against the stone, hands braced behind her to jut her breasts forward, hips upthrust through the thin fabric, brought up the tiny hairs on the back of Dean’s neck. 

She was beautifully made, he thought, as dispassionately as he could. Lovely, lush, carnal, not a straight line anywhere on her body. Unless you counted the one that led from her hand directly into his pocket, the minute he touched her.

“Good day, _signorina,”_ he said, standing up and drawing Alba into the crook of his arm. _“In bocca al lupo._ I hope this opportunity leads to many more roles for you.”

She said nothing as he turned to go. The surprise in her dark eyes – just a flicker, quickly banked – gave him a perverse sense of bitter satisfaction.

**

Fabrizio had reserved a box for him at stage left and set a pair of opera glasses on the seat. Dean flipped them into position, after a false start or two – it had been a while – and turned them on the orchestra pit. He could practically count the hairs on the violin bows. The first oboist had a little surgical kit spread out on his knees and was painstakingly shaving a scant layer of cellulose from one edge of his reed with a wicked-looking straight-edged blade. One of the horn players had a marinara stain on his cuff and was dabbing at it with a wet handkerchief.

_Lucia_ had never been Dean’s favorite opera. The libretto, he felt, did not improve upon the Sir Walter Scott original. And he had not voluntarily read Scott in years, despite the teenage Emily’s coaxing to the contrary. But it was satisfying to watch Fabrizio stride into view in the orchestra pit, dark hair waving, and bow under a wave of applause; when the baton lifted and swept down again and the music began, it was difficult not to think of that energy exchange as a particularly arcane form of alchemy.

The somber overture – minor key, throbbing foreshadowing in the timpani – gave way to a rousing soldiers’ chorus. Dean recognized a handful of the choristers by face, and almost all the principal men by name. How closely knit they all were, he thought, how tied together their fortunes. Tonight the baritone was raging onstage about his sister’s secret affections for the tenor; in two hours, he would be shoulder-to-shoulder with that same tenor, swilling pinot noir and shoveling in cheese noodles in perfect unison.

There were much worse ways to live.

The soldiers’ chorus returned. There was more ranting about vengeance; the baritone shook his fist in the face of the bass playing the priest, who was pleading for peace. A high note, some applause, a cloud of light dust as the soldiers stampeded offstage and made the scenery tremble slightly.

And now, a scene change: a plucked harp, sweet strings. Dean leaned forward; Maddalena was about to make her entrance.

Ah, yes, there she was in a pale blue gown prettily trimmed with paste pearls and tatted lace, hurrying onstage to meet her lover the tenor, tiny and almost childlike next to Giuditta’s taller, more voluptuous frame. At the sight of her, the audience burst into applause. Dean almost wished she would not sing; if she was not good, he would have to lie to Fabrizio later and insist that she had been, and he did not want to have to lie.

A few moments later, he relaxed into the knowledge that polite dissembling would be unnecessary. What a lovely sound, he thought, not large but perfectly balanced between warmth and incision, clarity and depth, and completely even throughout her range from bottom to top. 

The first-act aria was silly, of course – a ghost story about the spirit living in the Ravenswood family pond – just an excuse for Giuditta-as-Alice to declare it a bad omen and beg Maddalena to abandon her forbidden tenor. But that tune in the _cavatina_ , that searching, seeking, lyrical tune. It made you believe – if not in the ghost, then certainly in Lucia herself. _I might look like a little girl,_ declared the tune, _but I am no man’s pawn; I make my own decisions, and woe to anyone who thwarts me._

Giuditta’s voice was good, too, Dean thought, and though he would have thought her ill-matched for the fearful-but-loyal role of Alice, she was making him believe her. The ill-fitting dress – made not for her but for the much larger Bettina – and a mousy, greying wig helped, no doubt; there was little in her look tonight to remind him of the siren she had been this morning, except for the smooth, plangent velvet of her voice, which she could not disguise. 

Maddalena launched into the _cabaletta_ of her aria – of course she would not abandon the tenor! she declared, in cascades of shimmering roulades, and punctuated her resolve with a high D that brought down the house. Dean caught a glimpse of Fabrizio’s face during the applause – radiant with happiness and pride – and had to swallow a sharp, ugly stab of pure envy.

How connected they were, these two.

The tenor, Edgardo, appeared to announce that he had to leave the country but would return to claim Lucia’s hand in marriage. A duet ensued. Dean let the music wash over him – how lovely it was, in that soaring bel canto way, lyricism without apparent effort. So different from modern operas – Italian _verismo,_ German _Sturm und Drang,_ heavy glottal stops, huge orchestras, shouting.

He thought of Giuditta wrapped in thin blue silk, offering her body to him in the morning sunlight, and imagined her in leading-lady roles that would suit her more than this one: a sinuous Dalila, a knife-wielding Carmen, a haughty, imperious Amneris. _We make our own good fortune, do we not?_

_What I write is mine,_ said another, cooler voice in his head, _and I will claim it for myself._

Rosalind Lowell. The thought of her startled him so that he shifted violently in his seat and nearly stubbed his toe on the carved baseboard of his box. Where had she come from, and why was she intruding on his prurient mezzo fantasies?

Clear light-brown eyes, crystalline with unshed tears. A whiff of tuberose from her hair as she bent to dab at his wounded hands. The blood-heat of her rising through her jersey dress into his skin as he held her close to him. That _kiss …_

Intermission. Not a moment too soon, Dean thought, and gulped the champagne brought to him with only a passing thought to that morning’s wine-induced headache. Hair of the dog, nothing; Italy was turning him into a lush.

There was a tiny box of chocolates on the empty seat next to his. They were intended for him, he knew; the name on the box was from a confectionery two doors down from Fabrizio’s apartment, and the two of them had been there together. He ate one, then another. Soft centers, one caramel, one coconut. The sweetness lingered on his tongue as Act Two began: an acrimonious baritone-soprano scene between Lucia and her brother, in which Enrico produced a forged letter proving Edgardo’s infidelity. 

Even in 1836 during the writing of _Lucia,_ the forged-letter plot device had been shopworn. Dean, however, found it more convincing than not. We are all, he thought, too willing to believe ourselves worthy of abandonment, and on the thinnest of precepts. We need only a few words of confirmation to prove our fears; is it likely that we will look too closely at the handwriting?

Arturo, Lucia’s arranged bridegroom, arrived; the chorus, decked out in wedding finery, sang something cheerful. _Why is Lucia acting so strange?_ – the groom. _Her mother has just died_ – the brother. One signature on the wedding contract. Another signature, Maddalena drooping and half-supported by Giuditta as she lifted the pen to scrawl her name.

Commotion in the hall – the return of Edgardo! Dean watched him denounce Lucia, watched Maddalena – weighed down by what seemed half her weight in white satin – wobble and pitch sideways in her distress. Giuditta had not expected that; there was a moment in which she very nearly did not catch Maddalena’s arm, and another of unguarded exasperation. He smiled and ate another chocolate. Praline.

The famous sextet began – the old priest, the plotting brother, the two tenors – both betrayed, but in different ways – sad, helpless Alice, and then Lucia, a tiny central figure in white who was more sacrificial lamb than ever, in the midst of the men who meant to profit from her allegiance. In the novel, Dean thought, she really had been powerless. Here, at least, she had her voice, soaring over the rest of the texture despite her small stature, her physical frailty, her grief.

We could have cast this in Blair Water, he thought, studying the stage. Only the casting of the central love triangle would have made sense, of course. But what else matters?

Emily, as Lucia. Teddy Kent, as the lover come back from across the water to claim her. Predictably, Dean thought with a grimace, his own role in the narrative was unsatisfactory; Arturo’s longest solo moment in the whole opera was a mini-aria of less than a minute, embedded in the beginning of the wedding scene.

That had been their summer, he thought, his moment of happiness and expectation, before the real hero appeared to sweep the leading lady away. He tensed in his seat, waiting for the habitual wave of grief and resignation to overtake him. 

Instead, there were only the twining origami lines of the great sextet. Dean found his gaze drawn to Lucia, her white dress with its long train like a drooping pale flower among the black stems of the men. She had a look on her face that he thought could probably only be achieved in opera, profoundly sorrowful and yet somehow exultant. Raimondo and Enrico hedged her in, the chorus ranged murmuring behind her, Alice in her grey dress clutched her hand, and she bloomed on the stage like a hothouse lily.

The music wrapped him in its golden arms. Below him, Fabrizio’s face shone with exertion and joy and razor-sharp concentration. He was not looking at his score, Dean saw; he had not turned a page since the beginning of the wedding scene. His eyes were fixed on Maddalena, and it seemed that his feeling for her flowed through his arm and out through his baton and was picked up and amplified by the orchestra. How else could a piece so full of tension and heartbreak, Dean thought, feel to him so suffused with love?

The sextet cadenced – a perfect, chillingly despairing high note from Maddalena – absolute stillness onstage. The audience, stunned into silence, let Fabrizio conduct into the recitative without breaking the moment with applause.

_Did you sign the contract?_ – demanded Edgardo of Lucia.

Lucia, in despair – _Yes._

Edgardo – _You have betrayed both Heaven and Love. May God destroy you!_

The chorus erupted into the second-act finale. Dean watched Maddalena crumple forward into a center-stage faint as the tenor stormed offstage, and reached thoughtfully for the chocolate-box. 

Well, he thought, at least Emily and I didn’t come to swords and curses. It seems that there are some advantages, after all, to being Canadian.

It was the first time he’d managed to make a joke about the situation. By way of celebration, he ate his final chocolate. It was nougat.

The lights went on, and the curtains at the back of his box twitched open. “Champagne, _signor?”_ said the attendant with the tray of glasses. 

Dean took one.

**


	12. Chapter Twelve

CHAPTER TWELVE

**

The cast party was less riotous than Dean had imagined it would be, perhaps because it was so late. Intermission between acts in Italy was long enough to go away, eat dinner, and come back, and after the final act, the curtain calls went on for what seemed like an hour. The flowers, the bows, the receiving lines, the strangely empty interval during which the singers vanished back into their dressing rooms to hang their costumes and scrape off the grease paint: all this ritual was fascinating, but Dean wished with all his heart that he had not agreed to go out with them afterwards.

“Alba,” he said to Fabrizio in a tone meant to imply warning, but Fabrizio only waved at him and laughed. 

“Go,” he said, “go and see to her, and then come back. We will still be here!”

He dawdled as much as he dared, but even so they were still on the _antipasto_ course when he slipped through the curtained door into the big back room of the _ristorante_. Fabrizio waved to him and slapped the seat of a conspicuously empty chair. Maddalena, face scrubbed pink but with a few stray specks of stage blood still in her pulled-back hair, poured him a glass of wine.

“You were wonderful,” he said to her, and she blushed. Fabrizio slapped him on the back.

“I told you. Did I not tell you? Did I not? All the _bravissimi_ , all the cheering! She will be singing Lucia everywhere in the world, my Maddalena. Milano, Venezia, Roma.”

Dean doubted this. Her voice was lovely, yes, and she had raised the hairs on the back of his neck with the famous Mad Scene – the knife, the bloodstains, the eerie, iconic cadenza in thirds with the invisible voice of the flute – but she would be lost in a bigger house, with a less sympathetic conductor. Still, he nodded and smiled and drank the wine and ate a little of everything from the mountains of food on the table: ruffled arugula dressed with olive oil and anchovies, roasted baby eggplants stuffed with parmesan breadcrumbs and wrapped in local bacon, cold pickled vegetables, baked fish, chickens with crisp, herb-crusted skins, hand-rolled pasta in a thin green oily sauce that tasted like the ascended souls of all the garlic that had ever grown.

The singers and orchestra were cheerful and bright-eyed with adrenaline, but not loud. They ate with the same quiet, voracious economy that Dean had observed in bricklayers and farmhands; music might look effortless from the audience seats, but behind the footlights it was hard physical work. There was an air of expectancy in the room that he did not understand until nearly two in the morning, when the curtain parted and Alberto – who had a friend in the local newspaper office – rushed in with an early proof of the review. Fabrizio accepted the slip of paper, hands trembling only very slightly, and read it aloud to the hushed assembly.

Dean caught only bits and pieces of it – his conversational Italian did not encompass technical theater terms – but he understood enough to know that Lucia was an official triumph; there were gasps and stifled cheers after nearly every sentence. Maddalena was “shimmering … _brilliante … ravvisante_.” The tenor: _“eroico.”_ Fabrizio and the orchestra: “masterful … colorful … _magnifico._ ”

Dean – as familiar with Italian bureaucracy as any tourist could be, at this point in his journey – was all but certain that such glowing epistles did not flow from the reviewer’s pen without it being first greased with lavish applications of bribe money. Still, the cast was gratified; an air of relief had descended on the room, and now that the formality of the reading was finished, the party began to dissolve, napkins draped over plates, chairs pushed back, sated and happy and bound for their beds.

Dean waved goodnight to the beaming Fabrizio and excused himself. It was quiet out on the street, the outdoor tables of the cafés he passed empty and wiped clean, the lamps extinguished. The Adige was only a few steps away, and now that the streets were empty of humanity and its attendant odors, he could smell the river: aquatic, ozonic, very faintly fishy. He paused a moment, making a decision, then continued past the turn to his apartment and toward the Castelvecchio bridge. 

"Are you not tired at all, _signor Inglese?”_ said a voice from the shadows. As its owner emerged into the light, Dean saw that it was Giuditta, scrubbed clean of stage makeup but still flushed in the face and with a high bright glitter in her dark eyes. 

_Danger_ , he thought. _Proceed cautiously_.

“I am very tired,” he said. “But I have been sitting in one place too long tonight.”

“Ah?”

He gestured toward his bad leg. “The muscles cramp,” he said. “If I do not walk a while before I go to sleep tonight, I will be in pain tomorrow and very likely crippled.”

“Such a price you pay for the pleasures of music,” said Giuditta, and fell into step with him. “Well then, _signor,_ by all means, let us walk.”

“Are you not tired, _signorina?_ ”

“I am,” she said, shooting him a sideways glance. “But if I go to bed, the day will be over. And I am not ready yet for that to happen.”

“Ah yes,” he said, “your star turn. I heard you sing Alice and immediately pictured you in other, better rôles. Was the reviewer kind to you as well?”

Giuditta laughed. “Were the reviewer unkind to all others,” she said, “he would still have been kind to me. I made sure of that this afternoon.” Her pace was naturally quicker than Dean’s; she gave into it for a moment and skipped ahead of him, then turned the step into a pirouette. “But yes, the review was everything I could have wished for, in so small a part. See, here, there are three copies in my bag. One for my mother, one to paste into the book, and one to take out and read whenever I am in need of an encouraging word.”

“What will come next for you?” asked Dean. Giuditta shrugged.

“In this business, there are no guarantees,” she said. “But we move from _Lucia_ to _Le nozze di Figaro_ next, and Bettina’s ankle is still broken.”

“Will you be the Cherubino?”

“ _Signor,”_ said Giuditta reprovingly. “Our costumer is very fine, but she is not a genius. And she would have to be, to turn this—“ she outlined the shape of her own body with her hands – “into a teenaged boy.”

Dean laughed. “Marcellina, then.”

“Yes,” said Giuditta, not sounding particularly happy about it. “Another old woman. But a funny one, at least.”

“And for the end of the season?”

“Ah,” said Giuditta. “Fabrizio, he is a modern man, for a conductor. A living composer at last; we will do Signor Puccini’s new Japanese tragedy, and only two years after it was in Milan.”

“ _Madama Butterfly?”_ Dean frowned. “I would not think that Butterfly would flatter Maddalena’s voice.”

“No,” said Giuditta, “it is too heavy a rôle for her; she cannot carry it. But then, she will be carrying something else by then.”

“Oh?” said Dean. Giuditta lifted one shoulder in a shrug.

“They have said nothing to anyone, but there are no secrets in the theater,” she said. “It is all over the troupe that her gown had to be let out two inches in the waist for Lucia. She will have to sing Susanna in a forgiving costume and a firm corset – but like I said, our costumer is very good.” She smirked. “By the end of the spring, her condition will be plain even in a kimono. Not that I care; Bettina’s ankle will be better by then, and she can have the rôle of Suzuki with my blessing.”

“Allow me to guess,” said Dean. “Another old woman?”

Giuditta rolled her eyes. “Another old woman, _sì_.”

They had reached the Ponte Castelvecchio, with its brick walls and craggy Old World parapets. The built-in benches at the halfway point were empty. Dean gestured to Giuditta to sit, then sank down himself and carefully straightened his leg to maximum extension. The muscle protested for a moment and tried to cramp, then – thankfully – acquiesced. He should be fine tomorrow, Dean thought, and rolled his shoulders to loosen them.

“You have not said,” Giuditta prompted, “that you are happy for your friends.”

“Oh,” said Dean. “Of course I am happy for them.”

“Are you really?”

His tightest shoulder, the one opposite the bad leg, released with a muffled crack. Dean felt the point of light at his temple that would have grown into a migraine by morning pop and dissipate. “Yes,” he said, too tired to dissemble. “But I am jealous as well, I suppose. At this time last year, I presumed that by now I would be married myself, and as you can see, that did not occur. It is heartening to see that true love exists in the world. I just wish that it would happen to me.”

“Who is this girl who did not want to marry you?”

Dean thought about this for a moment, then laughed. “Imagine that you are the girl,” he said. “How could you be described in the space of a single sentence?” He let his head fall back against the ancient stones. “It does not matter who she is,” he said, “only that I am nothing to her any more, and she is nothing to me.”

“She is not nothing to you,” objected Giuditta. “If she were, you would not be so uninterested in me.”

Dean laughed. “Now we know it is too late to be awake,” he said, “for we are beginning to tell the truth to one another. Very well – shall I tell some to you?”

“Will I like it?”

“Probably not.” He flexed his knee again. “My body is twisted and imperfect, so I am at a natural disadvantage in this world; my infirmity is ever being used as a tool to manipulate me. Women like you see me and assume that I am desperate for any kind word or touch.”

“Are we not all desperate for kindness?” said Giuditta. “Do we not all need soft words?”

“I am an idealist,” said Dean as though she had not spoken, “which I admit is unfortunate. I can take no comfort from the action if I mistrust its motive.”

One lock of dark hair, slightly lank from its long captivity under the theatrical wig but still soft and shining, had fallen forward to lie against her cheek. Dean reached out to lift and tuck it behind her ear, careful not to touch her satin skin with his fingers.

“ _Verità, signorina,”_ he said softly, his lips scant inches from hers. “Let me hear your truth in trade for mine. Would you pursue me thus, were I not a wealthy man?”

Giuditta laughed. “What silly questions you _inglesi_ ask,” she said. “You had might as well ask yourself if you would desire me, were I not beautiful.” One dark eyebrow rose. “I presume that your infirmity does not extend to your eyesight? The girl you loved, was she not beautiful too?”

“It does not, and she most definitely was,” said Dean tightly. “I confess that I am as bewitched by beauty as any other man. But—“

“ _—Ma,”_ said Giuditta, mocking him. _“Ma, ma, ma._ What good does it do to dwell on what might be, or what is not, when one needs only to act on what is?”

“ _Come sei pragmatico,”_ said Dean, smiling in spite of himself; “such a pragmatist. I would be a happier man if I thought more like you, _signorina._ ”

“What stops you?”

“To exchange one kind of currency for another is a cold transaction.”

“A cold transaction that ends in a warm bed cannot be so very cold, can it?”

“I seek a deeper connection than can be achieved anatomically,” Dean said, struggling to his feet. “And were you older and wiser, _signorina,_ so would you as well. All the money in the world cannot shelter you from indifference or brutality.” He took a moment to gain his balance, then turned back and extended his hand to help her rise. She hesitated a moment, then accepted it. The look on her face was half-thoughtful, half-mutinous.

“Tell me something about her,” she said after a block or two of silence. Dean – half-hypnotized by the warm velvety darkness and the sound of softly flowing water from the river – looked at her, surprised. He had a scrap of the sextet stuck in his head, and was trying to remember how it cadenced.

“Who?”

She made a face at him. “The woman with whom you feel the _collagamento profondo._ Is she pale, with yellow hair?”

“Pale,” said Dean, still distracted, “but dark hair.”

“Black, like mine?”

“Brighter than that,” he said, only half-hearing the words he spoke. “Like autumn leaves when they’ve just fallen. And eyes the same.”

“Is she a society woman?” Giuditta demanded. “Droopy, useless, rich?”

“Rich enough, but not a bit useless,” Dean said. He felt like a sleepwalker, or a zealot caught up in religious glossolalia; he could hear himself speaking, but as if from a distance, or underwater. “Merry and bright-eyed, with a soft mouth that quirks up at the corner when something amuses her. If she is in pain, no one knows it or can guess; she sends it into her writing.”

“She writes books?”

“Not books,” Dean said. The sextet was completely forgotten, and his head was clearer. He tasted the words as he said them, and was surprised by how easily they tumbled off his lips into the dark. How long had they been incubating inside him, waiting to be given voice? “Music. She turns poetry into songs. Her hands are stained with ink. And her hair smells like tuberose, which in the language of perfumes means ‘dangerous pleasure.’” 

Unable to stop the tide of speech, he huffed out a little self-deprecating laugh. “She wears loose dresses in dark rich colors, and her skin glows like stretched opal against them. She wanders alone in gardens at night and communes with goddesses. She quotes Elizabethan poetry and bandages the hands of the wounded and rages against injustice under the moonlight.”

He paused to take a breath. His pulse raced. Bubbling in his throat were more intimate descriptors that were better left unspoken. _Her skin is so soft, the blood beneath it so hot. Her waist is small and her hips flare out from it like a Grecian amphora, and I know this because I felt her with my hands over her clothes while she pressed herself against me and moaned into my open mouth. She is silk and fire and honey and the aurora borealis in a summer sky, and I should regret this hopeless knowledge but I do not, I cannot, I will not, even if she is for someone else and not for me_.

They were both quiet until they reached the apartment building. At the door, a much-subdued Giuditta pulled her hand from the crook of his arm.

“You have given me much to think about, _signor,”_ she said. “And in return, I have this for you.”

She drew a letter from the pocket of her dress. Dean stared at it.

“It came a week ago, but the apartment number was smudged on the envelope and it was delivered to my mother. She gave it to me to give to you.” She lifted her chin in defiance. “I have been deciding whether or not you should have it.”

It was too dark to read the return address. Dean took the envelope. It was thick heavy paper, and he could feel where the metal nib of the pen had embossed it. “Thank you,” he said. “It is the first letter I have received since beginning my journey. I would have been sorry to miss it.”

“If it is from the woman,” Giuditta said, “I think it will say that she wants you to come back to her.” She paused, looking as if she might want to say something else, then shook her head impatiently, turned on her heel, and disappeared into the Abruzzi apartment. Dean unlocked his own door, scooped up a frantically happy Alba, and carried her over to the kitchen table to trim the old-fashioned Carcel lamp.

“Yes,” he said to the squirming Alba, “yes, I am terrible for leaving you so long. Yes, you are an angel to forgive me so readily. Yes, I will let you into the courtyard if you promise not to bark. No, it is not necessary to lick my face.”

She slid through his hands and out through the courtyard doors. Dean turned the wick a little higher on the lamp. 

The letter was from Isabella:

 _Have no idea if this will find you at your Verona apartments, the state of the Italian post being what it is. Boston is altogether too cold and damp and the boys want to take me to one of those ghastly Floridian resorts, as though I were an old woman, so I can no longer delay my departure until May despite earlier intentions. Have made the necessary arrangements with the Curtises and expect to arrive at the Barbaro before Christmas. How lovely it would be to spend the holidays with you there. I am assured that there is a room for you and your little dog, too, and that you are welcome to stay all the winter through, should you take a fancy to the place_.

Dean grinned and read on.

 _As for the Lowell clan: there are a boatload of Johns, they own most of Brookline, taken collectively, and it’s hard to keep them straight, as they’re all barristers and judges. No doubt I do business with at least one of them. Rosalind I haven’t seen since before she left for Paris the first time, but if she’s an artistic child I have no doubt that she’s being pressured to settle down and contribute a scion or two to the dynasty. The Curtises have of course welcomed her – you have no idea how many rooms are in that palazzo – but I reserve the right to grant or deny my support until I hear what the music sounds like_.

 _No need to write back, as by the time you receive this I will be en route. Safe travels to you_.

_Fondly, Isabella_

Alba dashed back inside, ears flattened and tail whipping, and jumped up to plant her front paws on Dean’s knee. They were wet; she had been playing in the fountain. He scooped her up and rubbed the velvety spot between her ears.

“Say goodbye to this place,” he murmured. “It’s time to pack up and move on, _piccolina._ The universe has spoken: we’re being summoned to Venice.”


	13. Chapter Thirteen

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

**

Dean was tempted to get off the train at Vicenza. He did not.

“One should really see the Teatro Olimpico,” he said to Alba, absently feeding her a shelled almond from the handful he had taken out of the sack. “It is so rare to see more than one Roman god in the same place, nowadays. But —“

Alba took the almond and crunched it, then inserted her nose under his hand and shoved upward in a mute request for another. Dean tapped the nose with one finger.

“I am fully aware what you’re thinking,” he said. “You think I am delaying the inevitable, and that the inevitable is Venice.” He ate an almond. “You think I should get it over with. Visit the Curtises at the Barbaro, stay a day or two, be pleasant, go to dinner with Isabella. Be polite, have a meal, move on.”

Alba whined. Dean fed her another almond.

“Oh,” he said. “Her. Yes, well. There’s that to think about, too.”

There was an uncomfortable flutter of wings in his stomach, which he resolutely ignored.

“The Piazza dei Signori in Vicenza is the most beautiful square in all of Italy,” he said, crunching. “One sits on the steps of the Basilico Palladiano and eats lemon gelato and watches the sun set in clouds of coral and cerulean.” He closed his eyes, remembering. “The hotel I am fond of, that coddles my eggs and always has a room on the ground floor, is only steps away, and would serve us breakfast on a rooftop terrace from which we could see all of the old town. From that terrace, the clouds are fluffy and wedge-shaped, like soft gray birds, and they move fast before the wind and leave sculls of white in their wake that glisten against the bluest sky you’ve ever seen.” 

His hands were empty. He dusted them together. “You could chase pigeons around the Torre Bissarra. I could find that little _trattoria_ again that served me the duck liver and the _osso bucco_.”

The train, which had been stopped, lurched to life again. Alba, seeing that the opportunity for almonds had passed, jumped onto his bunk, scratched his pillow into a more advantageous position, turned around three times on it, and tucked her nose into her belly.

“You would be fond of _osso bucco_ ,” Dean said. Alba didn’t move.

“Right,” he said to her glossy grey back. “Venice it is. But we don’t have to stay long, if it doesn’t go well.”

** 

He was unable to stop himself crossing to his berth’s tiny window, an hour later, and staring out as the train chugged over the fens toward the Santa Lucia train station. It was like a rippling green-grey sea, this landscape, plant and earth and ocean at the same time, traversed only by the narrow iron path of the train track. In a moment, they would cross the final bridge to the island of the city, and no carriage or automobile could follow them there.

“La Serenissima,” he murmured aloud, and laughed. Venice was anything but serene.

The Rialto train station was clogged with tourists and smelled of bodies and coal smoke. Dean slid a hundred-lire note to the most promisingly burly of the porters. _“Le miei valigie al palazzo Barbaro, per favore,”_ he said, stooping to reunite a leaping, ecstatic Alba with her leash and collar.

_“Certo, signor.”_

_“Grazie,”_ said Dean, and shouldered his lightest bag. _“Piccolina,”_ he said coaxingly to Alba, though he needn’t have bothered; she was already scrambling down the steps to the platform, delighted to be on solid ground and not confined to the sleeping car. Little did she know how scarce solid ground was in this city, thought Dean, and wrapped the leash around his wrist to keep her close to him.

The platform gave way to a wide interior corridor and presently to a light-flooded gallery. Dean picked his way through the crush toward the main doors of the train station, keeping to the side, and out into the sunlight. Ah yes, he thought, he remembered this flight of steps. Venice was full of them, stairs up into every building and onto every bridge, everything hoisted just high enough to keep it from the encroaching sea.

His leg was stiff, but not painful. He worked his way down the steps, keeping his body between Alba and the flood of faster-moving foot traffic to his left. Ah, there it was, the most beautiful city in a world of beautiful cities: a double row of Gothic palaces in marble pastels, pink, amethyst, citrine, opal, with a ribbon of moonstone-colored water between them. He took a deep breath and filled his lungs with Essence of Canal: salt air, teak oil and tar from the boats, a faint hint of old urine rising from the stones, rank but somehow not entirely unpleasant.

“Mr. Priest!” came a strident, unmistakable voice from the top of the stairs. “Oh, girls, look! It’s our friend Mr. Priest, from the ship crossing!”

_Don’t turn around, don’t acknowledge,_ said the voice in Dean’s head. _If she thinks you didn’t hear her, she’ll conclude that you’re some other hunchback not of her acquaintance and let you go._

“Mr. Priest, what a nice surprise this is!” Madame Lumber Magnate trilled from a few steps behind him. “How lovely to meet an old friend in a strange city! Minnie, Margaret, isn’t it lovely? And oh, look, you have acquired a little companion! How _sweet_ is she?” She beamed at him from beneath yet another hideous hat, incongruously jolly, as though he had never insulted her sensibilities with French novel plots or conspired to ruin her shipboard musicale. “I would have known your, ah, silhouette anywhere. So _distinctive._ Are you going our way?”

This was a trick question, thought Dean. Everyone in Venice went the same way, toward the great magnet that was San Marco, where the canal met the sea. “Ah,” he said, trying to sound discouraging, but she was already talking again.

“You must share our gondola! Your Italian is so much better than ours, it will be a great help to us, I am sure. Are you staying near St. Mark’s? Our hotel is ever so close to the cathedral.”

“I am staying with friends,” Dean extemporized. “Not nearly so far as San Marco.”

“But on the Grand Canal, surely?” She swung round. “Minnie, Margaret, for heaven’s sake stay close, and _you—“_ this, to the pair of porters struggling under a mountain of luggage — “ _do_ mind the bags!” She turned back to Dean. “They say Venice is just _full_ of thieves.”

“Do they?”

“I personally would rather have stayed in Nice,” she went on. “But the girls just insisted. ‘Mama, the art, the culture, the music!’ What can a mother do, but give in?”

“What, indeed.” Dean bent to scoop up the restive Alba. “I could not possibly impinge on your first trip down the Grand Canal,” he said. “It is indeed a once-in-a-lifetime experience; once you have seen it, it can never be unseen. I would not dream of intruding.”

“What a pretty little dog,” said Madame Lumber Magnate, ignoring this. “Too thin, though; you must feed her more. Did you acquire her from a breeder?”

Dean thought of Paolo and could not repress a smile. “One might say so.”

“Such a lovely refined color, and such manners. Our Poms would never be so quiet, would they, girls? You hardly know she is there at all!” She adjusted her grip on her umbrella and motioned the porters forward, toward the waiting line of water taxis. “And don’t be silly, Mr. Priest, we could hardly let you go off on your own in a strange city, knowing that we might have kept you company! Do talk to those brutes for us, won’t you? They always try to charge you double if they think you don’t speak the language.”

The breeze on the canal was brisk and cool to the point of chilly, teasing the slow-moving water into lazy caplets. Dean concluded his negotiation with their chosen gondolier and lowered himself carefully into the only remaining seat on the boat. Minnie and Margaret simpered at him from inside their wraps. Alba, shaken from her usual composure by the rocking of the gondola, burrowed trembling into his armpit.

He had been reading _Pictures from Italy_ on the train, and the lovely words from the Italian Dream, the words Dickens had saved for Venice, were still in his head. _The glory of the day that broke upon me in this Dream; its freshness, motion, and buoyancy; its sparkles of the sun in water; its clear blue sky and rustling air; no waking words can tell._

“… are you going? Mr. Priest?”

Dean shook himself out of reverie. “I do beg your pardon,” he said.

“How _distracted_ you are today,” said Madame Lumber Magnate. “Yours is the first stop, is it not? Where shall we find your friends?”

Unspoken, thought Dean: _who are those friends, and are they socially important? Are any of their sons unmarried?_ “Palazzo Barbaro, _per favore,”_ he said to the boatman, and saw Madame’s eyes dilate.

“How do you know the Curtis family, Mr. Priest?”

“I was invited to stay with them by Mrs. Gardner, who is a mutual friend.” He saw her mouth open to ask the next question, and smiled thinly. “I met Mrs. Gardner and her husband too many years ago to remember the exact date and circumstance. We are both fond of art.”

“How well-connected you are, to be sure.” Unspoken, but written on her face: _who would have thought it?_ Dean turned away to look out across the water, the sardonic smile tugging insistently at one corner of his mouth. He could almost hear her behind him, silently reevaluating his matrimonial prospects: his money had not been enough to offset the liability of his twisted body, upon their first meeting, but now that he was on friendly terms with the Gardners and Curtises … and those titled English boys had escaped back across the Channel to their moldering piles of stone without making any promises … and surely the hump wouldn’t be hereditary, would it? What would the babies look like?

“Ah, and here we are,” he said with grim satisfaction as the twin edifices of the great marble Barbaro mansion loomed up on the left. _“Eccoci qui, grazie.”_ The boatman drew the water taxi level with the dock, and Dean clambered out. His leg felt surprisingly stable, given the length of the train ride. Having a dog to walk was doing him good; his doctors would approve.

He bent and set Alba on her feet. “My thanks for the company,” he said. “Enjoy your stay in Venice, ladies.”

“But surely we will see you again soon!” Madame said, alarmed into speech by his air of finality. “We must have dinner, at least, or perhaps you will join us at the theater!”

“We shall see,” Dean said, noncommittal. “What an unforgettable experience it has been to meet you all again.” He nodded to the boatman. _“Rapidamente, mio amico,”_ he murmured, peeling off a banknote and passing it over. _“Prima che Madama possa parlare a nuovo.”_

The gondolier grinned, gripped his pole, and shoved. The water taxi rocketed away from the pier. Dean stood, a pleasant smile pasted on his face, and watched them bob away down the canal, Madame’s shrill voice floating back to him.

“Dean, my darling,” said Isabella from behind him, on one of the second-floor balconies. “How lovely to see you here at last; do come in.” She leaned over the balustrade to smile at him. “Are your bags coming behind you? I do hope you’ve not eaten yet – we have been staying up till all hours, and not lunching until three o’ clock. It’s grouse today, and figs in pastry, and some truly excellent fish that will make you feel quite at home.”

“It sounds perfect,” said Dean. Isabella beamed.

“Of course it’s perfect,” she said. “We’re in Venezia. And who, if I may be unpleasant for a moment, was that horrible woman?”

**

The Barbaro was unspeakably lovely: fully as grand as the Cardinal’s villa in Tivoli, but somehow managing to be more inviting than austere. Isabella led Dean and Alba into one of the salons and installed them on a white damask divan. “Look around as you like, dear,” she said. “I’ll see how far away we are from luncheon.”

It was the size of one of the smaller ballrooms at Versailles – the concert grand piano at one end of the room looked like a toy — and every wall was anchored by an enormous oil painting twice as tall as Dean himself and four times as long. Between the paintings was heavily carved custom wooden molding in the Baroque style, whitewashed to driftwood-grey and then artfully highlighted on its uppermost points of relief with leaf of gold. On opposite ends of the room were grand double doors with serene-faced oil portraits mounted over them in yet more nests of carved gilded molding. Light flooded in through the wall of canal-facing windows on the south side of the room, supplemented by four immense crystal chandeliers. They hung from a vaulted carved ceiling studded with five enormous circular paintings and burnished with more gold leaf. The floor was ancient terrazzo tile, polished to a soft red glow and spread with Turkish carpets. Gold velvet curtains lined the room just below the arch of the ceiling, concealing alcoves and doorways leading to the floor above. If one stood in one of those porticoes and looked down on this room, Dean thought, the man sitting on the white satin sofa would look like a child’s figurine; the tiny dog at his side would be a gray speck.

“Luncheon is in ten minutes,” said Isabella, reappearing in the doorway. “What do you think, darling?”

Dean grinned at her. “I saw your house first,” he said. “So this one feels like an homage to yours, rather than the other way around.”

Isabella shook a gnarled, beringed finger at him in mock reproof, but was clearly pleased. “You,” she said, “are entirely too charming for your own good. Now come, see where your flattery gets you; I am putting you on the third floor, next to the library where Mr. James wrote _The Aspern Papers._ Mrs. Curtis, sentimentalist that she is, has saved both the desk and the pen.”

**

Rosalind did not appear at luncheon. Dean was both relieved and disappointed.

“Never fret, dear; she arrived safely,” Isabella said unprompted, following his eyes around the table. “Venice acts in odd ways on creative types. Either they are out and rambling at first light and don’t come back until dark, or they hole up in an upstairs garret and scribble frantically and you never see them.”

“I must be very transparent,” said Dean, flushing. Isabella laughed into her napkin. 

“She does a bit of both, your composer friend,” she said. “Sometimes she’s in, sometimes out. I will say that she’s more charming than the standard writer type we sequester here, when one can winkle her out of her room for an hour.”

“And the music?” said Dean. “What do you think of it?”

“I have not heard the songs,” said Isabella. “Mrs. Curtis hosted an afternoon musicale a week or so ago, and Miss Lowell offered us her new piano trio. I found it surprisingly … muscular. Lovely, but with strong bones. The musicians asked to keep the score.”

“Ah.”

Isabella regarded him from over the top of her Limoges teacup. “At the risk of veering into inappropriately personal territory,” she said, “allow me to say that you are looking very much more like yourself than you did in September.”

“Italy must agree with me.”

“Italy must, yes.” She smiled, drew her napkin from her lap, and settled it atop her dessert plate. “I suggest an afternoon nap,” she said. “There is so much to see in the house, and it would be a pity to go exploring with tired eyes. And we really do keep very late hours here.”


	14. Chapter Fourteen

CHAPTER FOURTEEN  
  
**  
  
He did take the nap, merely shucking his jacket and dropping his cuff links onto the vanity before retiring. The bed was a four-posted, heavily carved mahogany monstrosity – Alba was afraid to scramble up the built-in stairs that led to its canopied depths, and had to be lifted in, whining — but the curtains could be drawn aside to let in the breeze from his balcony, and the mattress was, thankfully, modern. Once he woke, Dean lay there for another minute, enjoying the softness under him, the distant calls of the gondoliers from the canal below, and the plush, heavy quiet of the house itself.  
  
Alba rolled over on her back, extended her delicate legs, and let her paws dangle in invitation. He rubbed the white spot under her chin with a single forefinger, and she nudged him with her nose until her entire tiny skull was fitted into his hand.  
  
“Spoiled,” he said severely, and ruffled the velvet at the base of her ears the way he knew she liked.  
  
His bags had arrived while he was sleeping; they were in his dressing room, though not yet unpacked. And a silent someone had come in and left behind a pitcher of cool water and a basket piled with fruit. Dean selected a pear, bit in – the juice promptly spurted down his arm – and went to survey the lavatory. It, too, showed signs of updating. The tiles were the beautifully worn travertine original to the house, not porcelain or glass, but there was a claw-foot tub, a modern water closet, and a pedestal sink with hot and cold running water.  
  
He leaned over the sink to finish the pear, then threw away the core, washed his hands and his sticky arm with a creamy, pristine bar of soap that smelled of lilacs and had been carved into the shape of a swan, and rolled his shirt sleeves back down to his wrists.  
  
There was a water glass next to the pitcher, and next to it, a small shallow dish. He filled them both and put the bowl down on the foot of the bed for Alba. They both drank thirstily.  
  
A discreet tap on the door. “ _Avanti,_ ” Dean called, and a brilliantined head appeared, followed by a small slim body in a navy blue summerweight suit.  
  
“Good afternoon, sir,” said the owner of the head. “I’m Cabot, one of the Curtises’ senior footmen. I’ll be your valet during your stay.”  
  
“Cabot, eh?” said Dean, raising an eyebrow. “With that name, shouldn’t someone be valeting you?”  
  
Cabot winced, then summoned half of a smile.  
  
“An old joke, but a good one, sir,” he said. His professional gaze raked over Dean from head to stocking feet and up again, lingering briefly on the hump and — more pointedly — on Dean’s rumpled, rolled-down shirtsleeves and the water spots on his cuffs. “Shall I take your dinner clothes and brush them?”  
  
“They probably need it,” Dean said. “I’ve been living out of bags since leaving Boston.”  
  
Cabot’s eyebrows, it seemed, stayed in place only through a supreme act of will. “Indeed,” he said. He was already unlatching the largest of the trunks and extracting a set of evening clothes, which he held at arm’s length to survey.  
  
“It will take some time,” he said finally. “Might I bring you a book to read in the interim, sir?”  
  
“It’s an hour before cocktails at least,” said Dean, “and both my dog and I require exercise and air.” He indicated Alba, now perched sedately on the foot of the bed next to her water dish. She and Cabot regarded one another with mutual suspicion.  
  
“At least take the jacket,” said Cabot, plucking it from where Dean had tossed it and holding it so he could put in his arms. “And be back in forty minutes to be dressed for dinner. Sir.”  
  
Dean found Alba’s leash in his pocket, snapped it to her collar, shoved his feet back into his shoes, and escaped.  
  
**  
  
They wandered through the corridors until they came to a back door that led out to the central courtyard. The two flights of steps leading down to it were steep and treacherous, and Dean found himself grateful for the wrought iron railing, clearly much newer than the steps themselves.  
  
The courtyard was plain brick and looked far older than the building that surrounded it. The walls were stained by weather and covered in ancient stucco that had worn away in places to expose yet more brick, rose-red and tumbled smooth at the corners. Dean rather liked the look of it, though honestly he wouldn’t visit this part of the palazzo again anytime soon. How he was going to hoist himself back up those stairs once, he hardly knew.  
  
There were lush green plants, of course, both in decorative urns and in the ground, and a wall fountain on one side – the north, perhaps? It was hard to gauge the position of the sun from here. But it was enclosed and safe, and no one else was there with them. He sat down on a bench and unsnapped Alba’s lead so she could explore.  
  
The air was heated and still, and Dean was grateful for the shade. Maybe this little courtyard was worth the climb, after all. He leaned his head back against the sun-warmed bricks. He had been traveling too long, he thought, and the palazzo, grand as it was, felt like home – not his, perhaps, but someone’s. His body recognized it, and wanted to stop moving for a while.  
  
_We’ll see,_ he told himself, though not as sternly as he might have. A window was open, a few stories above his head, and someone was playing the pianoforte. He closed his eyes to listen.  
  
It was not particularly melodious. A note, an interval, a pause, another string of notes, another pause. It seemed random to Dean at first, but then he began to hear shape within it, a motive being revised and resurfaced. At one point the pause was broken by a muffled curse, which made him laugh softly.  
  
Rosalind.  
  
He could all but see her up there, pressing keys with one hand while holding the pen with the other. The silence, of course, was the space in which she did the actual writing. When he saw her at dinner later – if she came to dinner – the stain would have deepened on her finger.  
  
She was backtracking now to the beginning, to play as far as she’d gotten; the music from the piano sounded more complex and finished, but also more fluid, as though she was reading it from the page rather than making it up. ‘Muscular,’ Isabella had called it, and she was right as usual: this was thick with counterpoint, lines of melody and countermelody pushing almost irritably at each other, flowing from tension to deepening tension without pausing to cadence or even relax.  
  
There, thought Dean, listening intently, there was the new bit she’d just written, paired with something similar to it that moved in the opposite direction. How amazing it was, to hear it at the very moment of its conception and yet find within it a moment so familiar.  
  
Someone knocked on her door. The music broke off abruptly.  
  
“What is it?” she said, and at the sound of her voice Dean felt something turn over in his stomach.  
  
He had known, of course, that it was her. But his visceral reaction to the sound of her voice, after these months of separation, made him both giddy with anticipation and sick with fear.  
  
_Please,_ he thought, sending the prayer upward to every god he knew of but didn’t believe in. _Protect me from the inevitable calamity of this impossible passion, for I see it coming and yet am completely unable to protect myself._  
  
Alba’s head was under his hand again. He picked her up and gathered her under his chin, feeling her fast light heartbeat against his.  
  
“Come, _piccolina,”_ he murmured, forcing himself to smile. “The terrible stairs, they await us. And after that, we must see about some dinner for you, yes?”  
  
**  
  
Cabot was waiting with the brushed and pressed dinner costume. Dean, who loathed being valeted, suffered himself to be assisted into the clothes and to have Cabot knot his tie.  
  
“I can tie my own shoes,” he said at last, irritable. “I’m not an infant.”  
  
“With respect, sir,” said Cabot, already bending toward Dean’s feet, “to stoop and tie the shoes now that you are dressed would ruin the line of the suit with unsightly wrinkles.” He brushed an invisible fleck of dust from the mirror-shine of Dean’s patent-leather evening shoes and rose, lithe as a ferret. “The white gold cuff links, I think, don’t you, sir?”  
  
Dean saw with resignation that the contents of his bags had already been redistributed into the depths of the cedar-lined dressing closet that opened onto his bedroom. This included the few pieces of jewelry he had brought, now reposing on velvet-covered scented sachets in a low shallow drawer with an invisible pull.  
  
_When in Rome,_ he thought, and stifled a sigh. This part of high society, he didn’t miss. “Whatever you think best, Cabot,” he said, holding out his wrist. “And if you want to make yourself truly useful, tell me: what sort of dinner party is this, exactly?”  
  
Cabot busied himself with polishing the cuff links. “Tonight is an intimate dinner for the household only,” he said. “No more than thirty persons.”  
  
“I suppose in a house of this size, that does pass as intimate,” agreed Dean. Cabot preened a little.  
  
“Indeed, sir.” He fastened one link, then the other, and dusted some imaginary lint from Dean’s shirt cuff, which was starched so heavily that he could scarcely bend his wrist. “Only the most select family and friends—“ here, his eyebrow rose until it almost disappeared into his widow’s peak— “are invited to these small gatherings.”  
  
Dean ignored the unspoken question. “And how often are they held?”  
  
“One is always welcome to dine in one’s room,” said Cabot, “if one does not wish to be social.” His tone made it clear that he considered this a less-than-optimal alternative. “Tomorrow, Mr. and Mrs. Curtis attend the opera and dine out afterwards, so no formal dinner is served, though the kitchen will send up a simple plate for you if you like. Saturday is the weekly Carnivale party; that event is more - substantial.”  
  
“I thought Carnivale was no longer celebrated?” suggested Dean, who knew the answer to this non-question already. Cabot’s eyes shifted right and left.  
  
“Not among the Venetians, no,” he said. “Their Church does not allow it. But—“  
  
But the Curtises and their friends were wealthy, hard-spending American expats, thought Dean, and so they might do as they like. “I suppose one must be masked to attend,” he said diffidently, and out of the corner of his eye saw Cabot expand slightly with anticipation.  
  
“Indeed, sir.”  
  
“What a pity that I do not possess a suitable costume.”  
  
“The Curtises do keep a selection on hand, sir, to accommodate their guests.”  
  
“How hospitable,” said Dean. “But surely to wear one of the guest masks is to give away at least some portion of one’s mystery?”  
  
“If I may be so bold, sir,” said Cabot, “there are still a few shops in the city that quietly specialize in such things.”  
  
“The craftsman would have to be very skilled, indeed,” said Dean, touching his deformed shoulder, “to disguise every one of my … idiosyncrasies.”  
  
“I expect so, sir.”  
  
He might be a senior footman, thought Dean, but he has the soul of a valet; he is alight at the first suggestion of intrigue. “Very well,” he said. “You’ve put everything else away, so I suppose that means you know where my wallet is as well. Take what you need, make it happen, and bring me the receipts.”  
  
“You may depend on me, sir,” said Cabot, pink with pleasure. “And now, if you could address your attention to the mirror for a moment; is everything to your liking?”  
  
Dean looked, and was pleasantly surprised. Yes, he thought, there was the hump to contend with, still, but his linen was snowy and spotless, his shoes shined to a mirror finish, the pleats of his trousers pressed to knife-edges.  
  
“What do you know,” he said ruefully. “There is a gentleman inside me yet, it seems. Thank you, Cabot.”  
  
“Will that be all, sir?”  
  
“That will be all.”  
  
**  
  
Isabella saw him first and claimed him by the elbow. “There you are, dear,” she said. “Ariana has made you my dinner partner, since as far as she knows I am the only one here with whom you are acquainted. I needn’t ask you if you rested before dinner; you look quite revived.”  
  
“And you,” returned Dean, “are as lovely as ever.”  
  
“Cheek,” said Isabella, looking pleased, and smacked him on the forearm. The effort made her feathered fascinator shiver in her silver hair. “You may atone for your impudence by fetching me a champagne cocktail.”  
  
This wasn’t hard, as footmen were roaming the salon with laden trays. Dean plucked two flutes from the nearest tray. He and Isabella clinked glasses.  
  
“Not too many of these, mind,” she said, her voice low and conspiratorial. “They’re more Cointreau than champagne. You’ll notice that young Mr. Anderson over there has already indulged one sip too many.”  
  
Dean followed her gaze to a solid-looking specimen in the corner with a handlebar mustache and eyes that were rather too closely set. “He does look a little bleary,” he agreed. “What’s his story?”  
  
“Secretary to the American ambassador to Italy,” said Isabella, “until he married up. There’s the lady over there. She was Isabel Weld Perkins before she decided to become an Anderson. She writes books.”  
  
Mrs. Anderson was dumpy and pudding-faced but dressed like a queen; the clothes announced themselves more than they flattered her. She laughed at something her elderly dinner companion was saying, and immediately covered her mouth with her gloved hand. Dean saw that her teeth were slightly bucked.  
  
Poor girl, he thought. The gown and the diamonds can only do so much, and I know what that feels like more than anyone. “What sort of books?” he asked. Isabella shrugged.  
  
“Travelogues, poetry, children’s literature. Competent enough, but hardly earth-shattering.” She tugged him toward a two-person settee in the corner. “Ariana made her partner Mr. Whistler tonight, which is slightly unkind to both of them. She’s terribly intimidated by him, and he is hopelessly uninterested in anything that isn’t beautiful.”  
  
“You don’t mean to say that’s Whistler,” Dean said, squinting. “ _The_ Whistler.”  
  
“If you end up next to him at table,” said Isabella, “for heaven’s sake whatever you do don’t bring up the Ruskin unpleasantness, not that you would of course. It enrages him into apoplexy and he’ll have to leave before dessert.” She tugged his sleeve in the opposite direction. “There’s my nephew Augustus. Well – nephew-in-law; he’s on Jack’s side, not mine. Avoid him – all he talks about is politics. The man he’s with is a neurosurgeon who’s in Europe to lecture on his new technique of operating with local anesthesia; Augustus must be boring him to tears. Cushing, I think that’s his name.”  
  
“Those two ladies in the corner?” Dean inquired. Isabella grinned.  
  
“Now _they_ are interesting. You will notice how Whistler won’t even look at them?”  
  
“So they’re artists, too, then.”  
  
“The older one with the gimlet eye and the giant nose is Mary Cassatt,” said Isabella, “who is as much the _grande dame_ as Whistler is the elder statesman. The pretty one in mint green is Cecilia Beaux. A fine society portraitist, and she knows what fork to use and can talk to anyone about anything, so she is constantly sought after.”  
  
“I’ve seen one of her portraits,” said Dean, interested. “Probably six or seven years ago now. Sita and Sarita: a girl in a white dress, holding a cat.”  
  
“Ah yes. Lovely. I’ve seen that one too. The girl looks quite sharp-eyed and intent on something out of frame. And the cat—“  
  
“—Jet black, with golden eyes,” Dean finished. “Staring straight out, whereas the girl is in profile.”  
  
“On her shoulder like a little panther, guarding her,” said Isabella. “And her hair is dark, too, so you have to look twice to see the cat at all.”  
  
“Exactly. Genius.”  
  
They grinned at each other.  
  
A couple passed them — a stout woman in her fifties, draped in ermine, and an effete young man with dark good looks — and nodded. Isabella nodded back and Dean propelled himself to his feet to perform a half-bow.  
  
“Longfellow’s oldest daughter,” murmured Isabella, as he sat back down. “You know the poem, don’t you?”  
  
“‘Grave Alice, and laughing Allegra,’” quoted Dean, “‘and Edith with golden hair.’ Is she Grave Alice?”  
  
“The very same. We know each other professionally as well as socially; she has made it her life’s passion to find and preserve artifacts and antiquities.”  
  
“And the young man with her?”  
  
“Francis Crowninshield,” said Isabella. “Frank. Playboy journalist from Manhattan. Good friends with Condé Nast—“  
  
“—The publisher?”  
  
“Yes, and according to my sources they’re thinking about opening a magazine.” Isabella cut her eyes sideways at him. “He has a reputation for charm,” she said, and looked as though she would say more – though if she had, Dean would not have heard her.  
  
Rosalind was in the doorway.  
  
**


	15. Chapter Fifteen

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

**

She smiled and came toward him, saying his name, and Dean felt the fist of tightness in his chest relax its cold fingers, so abruptly that he almost staggered. After all, it was one thing to dally with the hunchback in a private garden, and quite another to take his arm in the grand salon of the Villa Barbaro, under the jaded, amused eyes of the _haute monde._ And yet, here she was, up on tiptoe to press her cheek against his, fingers on his sleeve to steady herself.

“You look well, Miss Lowell,” he said, and she drew back, beaming. She was wearing the gown he had first seen on the ship, bronze taffeta to match her clear cognac eyes.

“This is the best city in the world in which to write,” she said. “Everything is made of music; I have only to touch it, or breathe, and it seems to rub off on my fingers and sting my lungs. I can scarcely stand to lay down my pen.”

How like her it was, Dean thought, not to waste a single moment on small talk. “I think I heard a bit of your latest effort this afternoon,” he said. “Through the window, from the courtyard.”

Rosalind nodded. “I requested a room at the back of the old house,” she said. “I am miles away from everyone else, of course, and if I ask for food it is cold before it arrives. But there are fewer distractions, and I can bang away at the piano at all hours without disturbing anyone. All the other guests prefer to look out on the canal, it seems.”

Her hand was still on his arm. Dean imagined that he could feel it burning him through his jacket. When Cabot peels me out of it later, he thought, there will be a scorch mark on the sleeve of my shirt, and my skin will be blistered in the shape of her fingers.

“Mrs. Gardner tells me that your piano trio was a triumph,” he said. He thought this a lame attempt at conversation, but Rosalind glowed pink with pleasure.

“The string players are very fine,” she said. “They are principals with the Teatro Fenice, and the violinist has commissioned a sonata from me. Likely you heard a section of the first movement; I was fighting with the development this afternoon.”

“The development?”

“The bit in the middle,” she said. “One states the theme, then goes as far away from it as possible, chopping it up and turning it any which way around. Of course there must be a return, but the development makes one wait for it, struggle to hear it, even, and wonder how order could ever come again from such madness.”

“Ah,” said Dean. “Well. I thought it very beautiful.”

“And I think you very kind to say so.”

They smiled at each other. The dinner bell chimed.

“Ah, fair Rosalind,” said a smooth tenor voice from behind Dean. “You emerge from your solitude like Venus from her conch.”

She looked over Dean’s shoulder, her face closing and hardening into the social version of itself. “Are you accusing me of frothing, Frank?”

“A gentle foam only, and very becoming if I do say so.” The owner of the voice was the dark-eyed young man who had been talking to Alice Longfellow during the cocktail hour. His cravat was elaborate, his hair impeccably brilliantined, and his pencil moustache broken carefully open over his deeply shadowed philtrum like the two halves of a mechanical drawbridge. Dean hated him at once.

“I believe we are dinner partners this evening,” he said now, “and have consequently been counting down the minutes since the cards were put out. Come to me now, and relieve me of my loathsome solitude.”

Rosalind quirked one eyebrow. “Mr. Priest,” she said to Dean, “I hope you will not take it as a betrayal of our friendship if I introduce you to Mr. Crowninshield. He prefers ‘Crownie,’ but when he is in polite company most normal people call him ‘Frank’. Frank, this is Dean Priest.”

“Pleased, I’m sure,” said Frank Crowninshield, his gaze flickering over Dean dismissively. “You’re that Canadian chappie, aren’t you? Isabella’s mentioned you.”

“Mrs. Gardner is very kind,” murmured Dean. Frank rolled his eyes.

“She’s a tartar, you mean. An institution though – won’t hear a word against her, as long as I don’t have to hear it _from_ her.” He turned to Rosalind, putting his back to Dean. “Well, Rosie? Shall we go in? I promise to be erudite and charming from the champagne through to the coffee.”

“I hope you have come prepared with words other than your own, then,” Rosalind said, and Frank laughed as he appropriated her hand from Dean’s arm to his own.

“Indeed I have, fair lady. ‘From the east to western Ind., no jewel is like Rosalind’. How’s that?”

“Not bad, actually,” murmured Isabella, coming up to Dean as he stared after them. “Quick on his feet. Though he lacks foresight. If you start with the Bard, you have nowhere to go but down.”

“Not to mention,” said Dean, “that of all the lovely words in that play, he chose to quote the ones that were specifically written to sound like doggerel.” He shot her a rueful look. “They do look well together, though. The two of them.”

“Come, my dear,” said Isabella kindly, and took his arm. “The first skirmish is always the most bitter. Afterwards, one knows with what one is dealing.”

Dean took a deep breath, held it for a moment, and blew it out. “Reconnaissance, then.”

“With caviar and truffles,” said Isabella, “and tiramisù for after. So I assure you it is not without its pleasures.”

**  


He might not like the game, Dean thought, but he knew how it was played. It would do him no good to glower and sulk. He ate his excellent dinner, from the caviar-topped eggs _macédoine_ all the way through to the local cheeses and the duck pâté. He drank two glasses of red wine – enough to loosen his tongue, not enough to dull his wit. He talked to Isabella about the plays she’d just seen in Boston and to his partner on the other side, Mrs. Anderson, about her newest travel book, as Whistler was ignoring her in favor of pretty Cecilia Beaux.  


Across the table, Rosalind was seated between Crowninshield and Cushing the neurosurgeon, and seemed to divide her attention equally among them. Dean was both encouraged by this and disgusted with himself.  


They had agreed together that they were ill-suited, had they not? Why should he care if she linked arms with a dilettante journalist from Manhattan?  


The Curtises were not the kind of hosts that imposed after-dinner entertainment on their guests wholesale. They had options: in one parlor, a tame caricaturist to draw charcoal portraits of any interested party; in another, cribbage; in the third, brandy and cigars to the dulcet tones of a harp and flute duo.  


Isabella abandoned him without a backward glance for a cribbage table. Dean, with a sense of foreboding, followed the glint of bronze taffeta that disappeared around a corner, and found himself in the room with the sketch artist.  


It made sense, he thought, to have more than one kind of after-dinner entertainment. One could not, after all, expect Henry Whistler and Frank ‘Crownie’ Crowninshield to have similar tastes.  


The furniture in this room was more comfortable than he had expected: roomy and deep, with rolled upholstered arms. He installed himself in an armchair in the corner, took a snifter of brandy from a passing footman, and watched the caricaturist sketch a young blonde woman in a feathered fascinator and a shoulder-baring satin evening gown. The room’s other inhabitants clustered around the artist, offering commentary; this was the youngest subset of the dinner crowd, bright-eyed with liquor and growing more informal and raucous by the moment. He noticed that Crowninshield was near the front of the pack, and that Rosalind had detached herself to the outskirts.  


“She’s all lips, of course.”  


“We knew that, though.”  


“Percy did, anyway.”  


“Just Percy?”  


“Look, Gertie, he’s made you into a goldfish! A charming one of course.”  


“Brilliant.”  


Laughter.  


“Do Montine next. Go on, Teeny.”  


“Three guesses what he’ll emphasize of _hers.”_  


“Two guesses would do it. If Gertie is a goldfish, Teeny’s definitely a pigeon.”  


More laughter.  


Dean swilled some of his brandy and forced himself to relax into the softness of the chair. The room was dimly illuminated with the new flickering electric lights and augmented with candelabras around the area where the artist was working. There was a grand piano, slightly smaller than the one in the main salon, that had been moved to the side of the room to accommodate the easel and the supplemental lighting. Rosalind sank onto the bench; the key guard was down, but Dean saw her fingers moving against it, white flutters on ebony. She seemed relieved to have the bulk of the piano separating her from the crowd.  


Her eyes were faraway. He wondered what she was hearing in her head.  


“What a likeness.”  


“She could take flight at any moment.”  


“Bravo, I say.”  


“Who’s next?” A minor tumult among the crowd behind the artist’s easel: shoving, halfhearted protests, laughter. “William? Cymbeline? Marybeth?”  


“No, no,” said Frank Crowninshield, dark eyes glittering. “There is a newcomer among us. Who would we be, if we did not offer him the first turn? And what would our little bestiary be without a dromedary?”  


Dean met his challenging gaze with feigned disdain. “You need not make special accommodations for me, Mr. Crowninshield,” he said, “when I am only here because I find the company so … congenial.”  


“How modest you are,” said Frank, grinning. “Do you really mean it, I wonder? Or are you simply afraid that he’ll draw you swinging from the bell of the Notre Dame?”  


Uncertain titters from some of the girls in the mob. The moment stretched into cackling, red-eyed infinity. Dean felt his skin prickle and heard his ears ring. For a breath or two, he was ten years old again, away from home for the first time and backed into a corner. He could see their school uniforms, their bared teeth, the anticipation in their bright hard eyes.  


_Jarback,_ he heard, or thought he heard, and felt his throat begin to close.  


“You go first, Frank,” Rosalind said sharply from the piano bench. “I lay ten dollars that he’ll draw _you_ with ass’s ears.”  


The laughter stopped abruptly, as if guillotined. Crowninshield colored, whether in anger or embarrassment Dean couldn’t tell.  


“Now, Rosie. I’m just saying—“  


“If you’re going to be boring,” said Rosalind, rising in a crackle of taffeta, “I’m going to bed. Good night, everyone.”  


**  


It didn’t take long for the room to regain its gaiety; Dean supposed that three hours of champagne cocktails gave any crowd a certain amount of emotional resilience. He sat, face schooled resolutely to its highest possible setting of ‘ennui’, and sipped his brandy as the portraitist sketched dolphins and flamingoes with human faces. A footman brought in a phonograph and stood by to keep it cranked. Tinny toy-piano ragtime filled the room; couples detached from the group and began to dance. Childishly simple, this dance – the One Step, they called it. A step or slide forward, a step or slide back.  


Anyone could do this dance. Even he could, if he wanted to.  


He drained the dregs of his brandy and set down the snifter on a little marble-topped table. The mob was dispersed now, their movement to the angular, alien music exaggerated and deliberately comical. Walking through them, he felt like an old, deposed king from some ancient regime: dragging one leg a little, perhaps, but wrapped in a cloak of slightly-tattered dignity, and moving to a beat only he could hear.  


No one noticed him leave the room, or so he thought, until Frank Crowninshield caught him at the foot of the stairs.  


“No hard feelings, Priest?” he said. “You have to get used to us. We like to joke around a bit.”  


“I am quite accustomed to you already, I assure you,” said Dean. “I knew fifty boys just like you at school.”  


“S’pose I deserve that,” said Frank. He was really very drunk. “Can’t be too careful, though. Got to put you through your paces” – this, with another derisive look at Dean’s raised shoulder. “‘S not every day someone shows up and wants to put a ring on our Rosie.”  


“I assumed that was _your_ intention,” said Dean, startled into candor.  


“Could be,” said Frank, “could not be. Don’t know you well enough to say. And ‘s complicated.” He steadied himself against the banister. “G’night, Priest.”  


“Good night,” said Dean, and ascended to his room with more questions asked than answered.  


“Tomorrow,” he said to Alba in the darkness, after Cabot had been and gone and closed the door. “We’ll know more tomorrow. That’s just how it works.”  


She licked his hand, but he was already asleep.  


**


	16. Chapter Sixteen

CHAPTER SIXTEEN  
**  


He dreamt that he was back at Wyther Grange, lying on the faded rose-silk spread of the Pink Room with a bright moon shining in the window and Priest Pond lapping gently on the other side of the blackberry brackens. Behind his head, the swallows whispered to each other and swept the inside of the chimney with their soft wings. Dean closed his eyes against the moonlight. When he opened them again, Nancy Priest was sitting in the pink-satin vanity chair on the other side of the room, looking at him.  


Her chestnut hair waved around her face and the famous ankles were crossed on display in front of her. Her skin was unlined and as luminous as pink tourmaline, her body outlined in a faint nimbus of rosy light. If he squinted, he could see through her to read the pattern of the wallpaper.  


Her eyes were the same as he remembered – snapping, mischievous, all-knowing. Old-woman’s eyes. “You’re awake,” she said, and her voice was the same, too – mostly gravel, with the hint of a suppressed smile. “Good. It’s about time.”  


“The afterlife agrees with you,” said Dean, pulling himself up to lean against the headboard. Nancy Priest laughed.  


“You get to choose how you come back, you know,” she said. “Not that it matters; anyone who remembered me like this has been dead for dogs’ years. I like it, though.” She smoothed her translucent sleeve admiringly. “You’ll get to that point too, Jarback, if you work a little harder at it. The universe makes far more sense when you stop worrying about what anyone else thinks and just act to please yourself.”  


“If I remember correctly,” Dean said, “thinking like that got you forty years of solitude in an empty old house, with only Caroline to keep you company.”  


“Who’s to say I didn’t want it that way?” his aunt countered. She was grinning. Her naughty-gargoyle expression should have sat awkwardly on the smooth young face she’d chosen for herself, but it didn’t; rather, Dean saw for the first time what the legends attested to and the photographs had never quite captured, the fearless, formidable, animated wildness of her beauty.  


“And you?” she demanded, leaning forward and letting her lace mantilla slip over her shoulders. “What do you want exactly, boyo? And what are you doing to go out and get it?”  


“I – I don’t know,” Dean admitted, and sat up a little straighter when Aunt Nancy stamped her diaphanous foot.  


“Figure it out,” she snapped, and threw something at him. He reached to catch it, felt it smack into his palm and his fingers close around it. And then she was fading, the wallpaper pattern clearer, the moon brighter, everything warmer …  


He opened his eyes. Lovely room, cloudy day, voices calling from the canal outside his window, sleek grey dog curled into a _cornetto_ and snoring gently in the cradle of his armpit. Cursing himself for six kinds of idiot, he opened the fingers of his right hand and looked down. His hand was, of course, empty, though if he closed his eyes he could almost-but-not-quite remember the shape of whatever it was she’d thrown at him.  


He tried to bring back the dream for a moment, then gave up. Even the waking mind was a mystery. Who was he to ponder the depths of the subconscious?  


He sat up in bed, pulling the sheets along with him, and rang the bell for breakfast. It arrived presently, as did a slightly bleary-eyed Cabot. Isabella had not been joking, apparently, when she’d told him that the household kept late hours.  


He ate his toast, performed his ablutions, suffered himself to be dressed in his most comfortable walking suit, and escaped down the stairs, Alba levitating at the end of her leash beside him. On his way out, he looked into the salon where they’d been dancing the night before, half-expecting to see telltale signs of the evening’s revelry. The sticky glasses were cleared away, the artist’s easel vanished, the piano closed and polished and smelling faintly of lemon.  


He was opening the unguarded front door – it was so early that there was not yet a footman stationed there – when Rosalind came up the outside steps and met him in the doorway.  


“Mr. Priest,” she said, smiling at him. She was also in comfortable walking clothes - flat shoes, a woolen dress and heavy hooded cape – and carried an unfashionably capacious handbag. She was eating an apple. “Isn’t it a lovely morning?”  


“Beautiful,” agreed Dean, though truthfully it was overcast and grey, with chilly wisps of fog skating on the canal and a heavy sky the color of quarried limestone. “I think you’ve seen more of it than I have so far. Are you on your way back inside?”  


“Only for a moment,” said Rosalind. “I forgot my gloves.” She stooped to let Alba sniff her hand. “Wait for me,” she said, “if your little companion is not too urgent in her errand, and I will go back out with you.”  


“Are you sure?”  


“I’ll be quick,” Rosalind said, and was true to her word; she was back in five minutes, gloves in hand, cheeks slightly pink from the stairs. “The _vaporetto_ stop is only a short walk from here,” she said. “I catch it most mornings, so I know its schedule. Are you going anywhere in particular?”  


“I thought to visit the public gardens,” Dean said, “as Alba has been cooped up in travel or indoors for a few days and hasn’t had the opportunity to exercise.” He regarded her cautiously. “They are on the bay, beyond San Marco by a few stops. Lovely in their own way, and tranquil, but perhaps not the most diverting way to spend a morning if you aren’t a dog owner.”  


“I have had my fill of shopping and the theater,” Rosalind said, “and have worn out my welcome in most of the cafés near the Rialto, by doing more writing in them than drinking. I haven’t yet seen the gardens.” She tucked her fingers into the curve of his elbow and smiled up at him. “Shall we?”  


They boarded the water-bus, slower and more ponderous than the nimble gondolas but also higher off the water; Alba much preferred it. It was crowded, but only to San Marco, at which point it emptied enough for them to sit. They stayed on three more stops —past San Zaccaria, past the Arsenale — waited for the bus to moor at its designated pier, and disembarked onto the north edge of the canal, at the entrance to the Giardini Pubblici.  


It was still possible to see the dome of the great cathedral if one looked up and to the west. “Have you seen the inside?” Rosalind asked, and Dean nodded.  


“Once, years ago.” He stuffed his hands in his pockets. _“So light, it might have been the work of fairy hands; so strong that centuries have battered it in vain.”_  


“Dickens,” Rosalind said, and laughed. “I read it too, on the passage over from Boston. He is so much more enthusiastic when he’s describing the torture room and the unmarked graves, isn’t he? I kept picturing him as a particularly ghoulish tour guide, leading twenty British schoolteachers from building to building and making a point of showing them the mildew in all the corners.”  


“Well,” Dean said, “it’s an ancient city with a bloody history. It’s not all flying buttresses and gondolas.” He slanted her an amused glance. “Would you rather read _Cook’s?”_  


“Reading doesn’t work like that, I’m afraid,” said Rosalind. Prim voice and folded hands, smile lurking in her eyes. “It’s never one book _or_ another – it is always one book _and_ then the next.” She gestured to Alba, who was straining toward the promise of grass. “We’re inside the gate – shall we let her run?”  


Dean stooped to unfasten the clip on her collar. They watched her dash into the middle of a flock of aggrieved pigeons, scattering them skyward.  


“A mighty hunter,” observed Rosalind. “Is she ever fast enough to catch them?”  


“Fast, yes,” said Dean. “But not hungry enough to seriously try.” He called her back to his side, and the three of them went farther into the garden.  


“It’s strangely shaped, isn’t it?” Rosalind said. “Just a skinny little strip of land. And the trees look … planned. They’re in such straight rows.”  


“Napoleon had it designed,” Dean said, “not even a hundred years ago. It’s probably the newest thing in the city.”  


“It’s lovely,” said Rosalind, “in this weather.”  


The fog was thicker here, as they were closer to the sea, and palpable to the touch, cool and enveloping and silent. They wandered through the symmetrically placed trees, marveling at the shaggy black trunks swirled in swathes of silver veiling. The farther they walked, the thicker the fog became, until Alba pressed at Dean’s knees – a slightly darker shadow, within shadows – and whined to be lifted.  


“Here,” said Rosalind, and produced her enormous bag. “She’ll fit nicely inside it, and I’ve eaten all the breakfast I brought with me so there’s no mischief for her to find. The apple core, maybe.” She swept the inside of the bag with her fingers. “There it is; I’ll throw it away now.”  


“Her paws are wet. Won’t she spoil your sheet music?”  


“It’s covered in oilskin.”  


“I’ll carry her,” offered Dean, and took the bag, shifting it to his far shoulder. A moment later, he felt Rosalind’s hand brush his. He froze, startled – had she meant to do it? – then swallowed hard as she linked their fingers and squeezed.  


“I feel like there must be a body of poetry about fog,” she said: starting to walk again, towing him nonchalantly along with her. “But I’ve never quite found one that fully captured the way I feel about it.”  


“How do you feel about it?”  


“As if it heightens intimacy,” said Rosalind. “Poets always talk about how isolating the fog is – how disorienting. But if one is alone and happy to be so, or walking with a – a good friend —“ She squeezed his hand again. “It can be liberating, to pass through the world and not be seen.”  


They walked in silence for a moment.  


“Do you know the poet Yosa Buson?” Dean said presently.  


“No. I assume he is Japanese?”  


“From the 18th century. He has a haiku about fog that I’ve never understood until now, hearing you talk about it.”  


“What is the poem?”  


_“Asa giri ya e ni kaku yume no hito dôri,”_ quoted Dean. “I’m not keeping the syllables true in this translation, but basically it’s ‘in morning fog, the street is full of people from the painter’s dream.”  


She was quiet – listening attentively – so he forged on. “I think he’s talking about how fog affects perception. Japanese art so often utilizes ink as the medium, and the figures are clear and precise. Fog is a way to blur the edges of that precision, to collapse time and space and indicate the presence of metaphor.”  


“I see what you’re saying,” she said. “The people on the street might be real, they might be imagined, or they might be memories of people who used to be there and aren’t anymore. Through the fog, he’s seeing everyone who was ever there or ever will be.”  


“Exactly.”  


They were silent for a long time. They had turned back toward San Marco by now, but the fog was still intense, the trees around them dripping. Rosalind was walking faster, almost dragging him along, and Dean didn’t understand why until they had passed out of the garden and turned a corner toward a café. “Do you mind if we stop here for a moment?” she asked, and barely waited for his assent before sitting down under an umbrella at one of the outdoor tables and sliding her hand into the bag he was carrying for the oilskin folder containing her manuscript paper.  


“Just a minute,” she murmured, producing a pencil and a stub of eraser from one of her cape pockets. “Won’t take long.”  


A bemused waiter approached them. How mad they must look, Dean thought, two _inglesi_ tourists outside in the fog, one with her head down, scribbling madly, the other clutching a woman’s handbag with a dog inside it. He ordered coffee for both of them and sipped his while her pencil raced over the damp paper and her espresso went cold. Her face was both completely blank and oddly ecstatic, her eyes at once hyper-focused and unseeing.  


_“Nient’altro?”_ asked the waiter at his elbow. Dean ordered a slice of _panettone_ and settled in to wait.  


He had never seen Emily like this. After, yes – flushed and dreamy with afterglow. Before, too — a light would come on behind her eyes and she’d make an excuse to cut their evening short. At the time, he had found it infuriating.  


Perhaps, he thought now, carefully picking raisins out of a bit of _panettone_ before feeding it to Alba, he would have felt differently about her art if he had seen it firsthand. Maybe it would have helped him understand.  


Rosalind raised her head, dropped the pencil, and shook her hand ruefully. “Sorry,” she said, reaching for her stone-cold coffee. “You must be freezing to death. Mostly people don’t wait for me, when I get like this.”  


“I have some experience with the creative impulse,” Dean said, and offered her the last bite of his _panettone._ She took it from his plate with her fingers and popped it into her mouth.  


“What you said about condensing time and space,” she said with her mouth full, shuffling papers expertly into a stack and shoving them back into the oilskin. “That concept just works so beautifully in musical form. And the idea of fog as the metaphor that blurs the lines?” She reached into her bag, slid the oilskin into it, and ruffled Alba’s ears. “That’s just fascinating. You know Monsieur Debussy’s work of course.”  


“Of course,” Dean said, dropping coins on the table. “Whole-tone scales, lots of pedal, obsessed with the Javanese gamelan.”  


“They thought he was mad, twenty years ago, when he was at the Paris Conservatory,” said Rosalind. “Mad and arrogant and unteachable. And now he’s hailed as a genius, and everyone writes music that tries to sound like his.” She shook her head. “I keep thinking about that. What’s the difference between the person who does something first, and the hundred people who try to replicate the magic? The innovative person is differently motivated, that’s what. There’s inspiration there that isn’t rooted in expectation.”  


They had reached the pier where the vaporetto stopped, but it wasn’t anywhere in sight, and Rosalind was shivering. Dean saw the prow of a gondola from a hundred yards away and hailed it with a raised arm. It changed direction and glided to a stop in front of them.  


“Come now,” he said, taking her by the arm. “You’re cold. Let’s get you back to the villa.”  


Rosalind allowed herself to be folded onto the seat of the gondola, but her mind was clearly elsewhere. “That poem,” she said. “What you said about the fog. It gave me a flash of insight into something I hadn’t thought about before.” She peered up at him. “You’re laughing. Am I being incoherent? I can do that sometimes – the thoughts come too quickly to make sense when I try to talk about them.”  


“I knew someone else,” Dean said. “A writer. She called it the same thing – the ‘flash’.” He settled himself next to her and gave the address to the gondolier. “I used to laugh at her for it, behind her back,” he admitted. “She was young, and it seemed like such an overly dramatic word.”  


“It’s not that it’s dramatic,” said Rosalind. “It’s that you only get a second to glimpse it, before the curtain drops again. After that it’s hard work and drudgery, to turn it into something.”  


Her hand was back in his, hidden between their bodies and under a fold of her cape. It was a bad idea, he knew, but he laced his fingers tightly through hers anyway, and held onto her all the way back to the villa.


End file.
